Industry standards group the Broadband Forum appointed representatives from Verizon and China Unicom to its board of directors, strengthening collaboration with mobile players as it works to advance projects focused on 5G and the connected home.

Chairman John Blackford said in a statement input from operators provides “unique insight into what is important for the industry” helping the forum ensure “our work remains at the cutting-edge”.

Mike Talbert, senior manager of in-premise architecture at Verizon, and Ding Hai, a research engineer at China Unicom, joined board members from BT, Calix, CommScope, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, InCoax, MaxLinear, Nokia and Telecom Italia.

Broadband Forum president Tom Starr, of AT&T, retired after 26 years on the board, replaced by Bernd Hesse, a senior director at Calix.

The appointments were made during the group’s Q3 meeting, when its fixed-mobile convergence working group also published initial 5G specifications for network architecture.

And it detailed a collaboration with the prpl Foundation focused on the connected home, which will employ the forum’s user services platform to make it easier for application developers to build new services for interoperable gateways.