The DSL Forum announced today it is changing its name to the Broadband Forum to better reflect its current, broader focus.

Though the group isn’t taking its eye off DSL, it hopes to influence other broadband access technologies such as those related to fiber-to-the-home, for example.

“Because of the DSL in our name, many of our specifications that are access-agnostic, management related or provide solutions to broader broadband issues, were being missed by the standards community because they mistakenly thought our work was just DSL-specific,” said George Dobrowski, chairman and president of the Broadband Forum, in a prepared release. “The Broadband Forum name captures our true mission, which is to develop the full potential of broadband. That means continuing our good work on DSL innovation and standards, adding more digital home support work and continuing to expand our efforts to include more policy control, [quality of service] and network optimization work in order to better support tomorrow’s diversified multi-play services.”

Founded in 1994, the DSL Forum was instrumental in creating technical specifications for Digital Subscriber Line technology including -- perhaps most notably -- TR-069, which defined an application layer protocol to remotely manage a variety of customer premises gear (e.g., routers, set-top boxes and gateways). According to the Forum, nearly 30 million devices now adhere to TR-069.

But the group is currently working on some non-DSL specifications, including some for passive optical networks and Layer 2 control mechanisms.