The new head of the forum will be Ken Ko, who has already announced his new role on LinkedIn. He was previously senior staff scientist at Adtran.
Mersh (pictured) was with the Broadband Forum since 2006, as COO for four years and for the last decade as CEO until he left in December. However, the Broadband Forum still lists Mersh as CEO on its website.
“It has been a blast and we achieved a lot in that time, and made a real difference for a critical technology,” he posted on LinkedIn. He told the Broadband Forum: “It has been an honour serving the broadband community through some very exciting times. It has always been interesting and rewarding, but I am happy to leave the organisation in good hands.”
He has joined QxP, a consulting company, where he will be working as senior VP of sales for its Virtuosi virtual reality product, aimed at pharmaceutical companies. His wife, Crystal Mersh, is CEO of QxP.
Ko, whose LinkedIn entry describes him as managing director rather than CEO, had been at Adtran for 11 years until 2019. He previously worked at Concurrent Technologies and Raytheon, among other places. He has degrees in electronic engineering.
From 2018 onwards Adtran has been leading the Broadband Forum’s application-level traffic generation testing. Ko said at the time: “As carriers invest in upgrading the access infrastructure and look to leverage the service creation capabilities now available, it is critical that testing evolves to keep pace and ensure that the promises of software-defined access are realised.”
Mersh joined the industry in 1993 at Cable & Wireless’s Mercury Communications, and then worked at BT before moving to sales roles at a number of vendors, including Axiom Systems, TTI Telecom and Evolving Systems.
