Why we started the foundation

For roughly a decade, the industry has debated whether wireless would replace wired. It has not. The result is something more interesting: wired infrastructure is now the substrate that makes wireless, AI, and cloud work at the edge. It is less visible than it has ever been, and more load-bearing than it has ever been.

We started the RELISAV ConnectedEdge Foundation because the existing institutional landscape does not match that reality.

The existing map

Today’s wired-infrastructure institutions fall into three broad groups. Each does useful work. None is sufficient on its own.

Single-technology alliances — MoCA, HomeGrid, various Ethernet working groups — do excellent work inside their own technology envelope. They were designed for device certification and spec maturity, and they deliver on that. They were not designed to solve the cross-technology problems that now dominate real deployments.

Standards bodies publish the specs that keep the industry moving. They are slow by design, and appropriately so. They are not where reference code, joint engineering, or skills certification live.

Vendor consortia move fast and produce useful artifacts, but their governance is tied to the vendors who fund them. That is fine for marketing and often fine for interop events. It is a poor place to steward a decade-long commons.

What is actually hard

We spent the second half of 2025 talking to operators, utilities, smart-building owners, industrial integrators, and silicon vendors. The same three complaints surfaced in every conversation.

1. “My plant is mixed media, and no one is responsible for the integration.”
2. “I pay for the same interop lab five times, because every alliance runs its own.”
3. “I cannot find certified people whose credential means they have shipped something.”

Those are not technology problems. Each of them is an institutional gap.

What a foundation can do that other bodies cannot

A foundation — legally neutral, member-governed, long-horizon — can do four things that the existing institutions structurally cannot:

• Operate across technology boundaries without threatening the identity of any single-technology alliance.
• Ship open engineering assets — code, tests, reference architectures, tooling — under a permissive, royalty-free license that member patent commitments cover.
• Certify people, not products. A neutral foundation is the right home for skills-based credentials because employers trust credentials that do not come from anyone’s vendor.
• Outlast product cycles. Foundations plan in decades. Product lines do not.

What we are not

We are not a replacement for MoCA, HomeGrid, IEEE 802, or any standards body. We are complementary: we pick up the integration, joint engineering, and skills problems that sit between them.

We are not a vendor consortium with a foundation logo on it. Our governance caps any single company’s influence, and the Technical Steering Committee is elected across member categories — operators, utilities, integrators, and individuals all have seats.

We are not a certification mill. Our certification model is deliberately evidence-based and will move slowly enough to stay credible.

What to expect in the next twelve months

• Five open projects landing their first public milestones (see the Build page).
• The first two reference architectures published with full conformance evidence.
• The Academy’s Associate and Practitioner tiers open for enrollment.
• A CRA-aligned security baseline published with sample SBOMs for edge products.
• At least two public joint-engineering sprints, run in the open with recorded sessions and public output.

If any of this resonates, come participate. If it does not, tell us why — the fastest way to shape a foundation is to show up in its first year.

— Stewardship Team