2020.10.07 – Broadband Forum finalizes specifications to increase Broadband Network Gateway scalability

Broadband Forum finalizes specifications to increase Broadband Network Gateway scalability

Landmark standards will help network operators cope with increasing bandwidth demands as broadband and video usage accelerates across devices

Fremont, California, 07 October 2020: Operators facing increasing bandwidth demands will be able to increase the scalability of their networks in a more flexible way from today, as Broadband Forum completed its specifications for Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) disaggregation.

With video and broadband consumption continuing to grow, Broadband Forum’s “Control and User Plane Separation for a Disaggregated BNG” (TR-459) addresses the increasing bandwidth demands being placed on BNGs and the challenges in control plane and user plane scaling. The architecture also reduces time to market for new services and increases service resilience.

Additionally, it significantly simplifies network operation by drastically reducing the number of management points. Disaggregated BNG User Plane deployments can be scaled to match subscribers’ broadband demand and then be managed by a control plane instance in a centralized location. This brings benefits such as reduced operational expenditure (OPEX) for operators.

“Over the years, BNGs have had to evolve to support new functionalities such as management of multiple types of accesses, transport encapsulations and customers,” said Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh. “Broadband Forum’s work responds to the changing ecosystem and ensures flexible scalability through an agile architecture constructed to meet operators’ needs.”

Defining the architecture and requirements for a disaggregated BNG control plane and user plane, TR-459 separates the control plane and data plane. The work will enable the control plane and user plane to be easily scaled independently according to what is needed for new services and additional customers. This will also bring benefits such as centralized locations for configuration and IP address management, leading to easier operations and faster delivery of new services.

Geographical-related challenges such as fragmented IP pool management, under-utilized control plane and complex operation and management for software upgrades and service provisioning are also addressed by the specification.

“Operators have previously suffered from very limited choice when addressing subscriber growth or bandwidth demand. The most common approach has always been to add more BNGs into the network,” said Kenneth Wan, Senior Product Manager at Nokia. “The Disaggregated BNG changes this. It not only offers flexible user and control plane scaling but ensures operational simplicity by using a single control plane function to manage multiple instances of user plane. The completion of TR-459 is of significant importance, especially for service providers, who have been eagerly anticipating a Broadband Forum standard Disaggregated BNG reference architecture with standardized interfaces and protocols.”

For more information about Broadband Forum, please see: https://www.broadband-forum.org/.

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About Broadband Forum

Broadband Forum is the communications industry’s leading open standards development organization focused on accelerating broadband innovation, standards, and ecosystem development. Our members’ passion – delivering on the promise of broadband by enabling smarter and faster broadband networks and a thriving broadband ecosystem.

Broadband Forum is an open, non-profit industry organization composed of the industry’s leading broadband operators, vendors, thought leaders who are shaping the future of broadband, and observers who closely track our progress. Its work to date has been the foundation for broadband’s global proliferation and innovation. For example, the Forum’s flagship TR-069 CPE WAN Management Protocol has nearly 1 billion installations worldwide.

Broadband Forum’s projects span across 5G, Connected Home, Cloud, and Access. Its working groups collaborate to define best practices for global networks, enable new revenue-generating service and content delivery, establish technology migration strategies, and engineer critical device, service & development management tools in the home and business IP networking infrastructure. We develop multi-service broadband packet networking specifications addressing architecture, device and service management, software data models, interoperability and certification in the broadband market.

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For more information about the Broadband Forum, please go to https://www.broadband-forum.org or follow @Broadband_Forum on Twitter. For further information please contact Brian Dolby on +44 (0) 7899 914168 or brian.dolby@proactive-pr.com or Jayne Brooks on +44 (0) 1636 704 888 or jayne.brooks@proactive-pr.com.