2020.10.09 – Open Broadband News

Broadband Forum finalizes specs to increase gateway scalability

Operators facing increasing bandwidth demands will be able to increase the scalability of their networks in a more flexible way, 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.”

PON 2020 reality check – Broadband Forum vBASe webinars provide exclusive insight and overview of market

According to OpenVault’s Broadband Insights Report, broadband usage increased by 47% during the first quarter of 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This statistic emphasizes our ever-growing dependence on broadband networks across the world and the increasing strain operators are under. Alongside this, new connected services are growing in popularity, including the Connected Home, UHD streaming and Virtual Reality. At the same time, customer experience has never been more critical.

To ensure our broadband networks can cope with these rising trends and future demand, the industry must come together. And yet, at a time when reporting new breakthroughs and sharing best practices is more critical than ever, countless meetings, conferences and exhibitions have been and continue to be cancelled.

This is exactly why Broadband Forum moved ahead with its BASe series, turning our face-to-face workshops into a series of extremely informative and well-attended webinars. Read the full blog here from Bernd Hesse, President and Marketing and BASe Chair of Broadband Forum.

Fib-tastico! Italy adds a dash of fiber to its favorite broadband dish

Telecom Italia (TIM) has deployed Fiber-To-The-x (FTTx) technology in more than 2,700 municipalities in Italy in the past seven months as it continues its broadband rollout, which also embraces fixed-wireless access (FWA). TIM said more than 5,000 municipalities will have fiber infrastructure by the end of the year, up from 4,700, currently, and many of them are situated in “white areas”, enabling around 75% of households in those areas that use a fixed network to benefit from digital technology.

The incumbent operator aims to expand its ultra-broadband coverage and close the digital divide in Italy by 2021. TIM will also continue to intensify its cabling programs in the coming months, bringing fiber by December to 90% of households nationwide that use the fixed network, in order to provide an effective response to the growing demands for connectivity, mainly from rural or sparsely populated areas of the country.

Operators in the transfer market for open software and automation  

Four of the world’s largest network operators are advocating for the Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) to be disaggregated and improved with open software and automation. BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Vodafone issued a group position paper outlining their “collective need” for an open BNG framework based on generic hardware and software with open APIs.

This network element manages policy for fixed broadband user sessions and provides the gateway for backhaul network connectivity, the operators explained. The group recognizes that several open source communities are already working on this effort, including the Broadband Forum, Open Compute Project, Open Networking Foundation, and the Telecom Infra Project, with each focusing on specific topics or layers of BNG.

“Service efficiency improves by migrating from traditional operational practices through cloud-enabled to cloud-native microservice applications with applications that are distinct from the underlying platform,” the operators wrote in their collective call to action. “We believe that splitting apart the BNG software from the BNG hardware will lower the barrier-to-entry and attract the greater participation of both existing and new hardware vendors and software suppliers.”

Once uPON a time…Opticomm promises fairy-tale fiber speeds down under

Fiber-To-The-Premises (FTTP) provider OptiComm is in the final stages of developing Australia’s first Ten Gigabit per Second Passive Optical Network (XGS-PON) – the next-generation Passive Optical Network (PON) – allowing residential customers to access a nominal line speed of up to 1Gbps, and commercial customers to reach speeds up to 10Gbps.

Following extensive testing, modelling, research and development, OptiComm will be ready to deploy the XGS-PON in 2020, commencing with a residential and commercial precinct in Melbourne. OptiComm, which is the largest private competitor to the NBN, has been working closely with its supplier, USA-based ADTRAN, at the latter’s research and development facility in Melbourne, leading to the testing of these 10Gbps services.

“Most games, and many game updates are now well over 100 gigabytes in size, so our new XGS-PON will allow those to be downloaded in less than a minute,” said Geoff Aldridge, Chief Customer Officer at Opticomm. “We’ve heard a lot of chatter in the industry, most groups have identified and forecasted that the XGS-PON will be the dominant technology being deployed around the world as early as next year.”

CloudCO demonstration and vBASe session at Broadband World Forum

As Broadband World Forum (BBWF) takes the virtual stage, discover more about Broadband Forum and its globally renowned User Services Platform (USP) and how it has revolutionized the Connected Home experience. Chaired by Jason Walls, QA Cafe and Co-Director of Broadband User Services (BUS) Work Area, the discussion will include presentations from F-Secure, DOMOS, Verizon, BT, Nokia and QA Cafe.

The virtual webinar will discuss how operators can leverage USP / TR-369 to deploy real user services in the Connected Home. This will discuss how the broadband industry transitioned from TR-069 to USP, and how device management, control and end-user services has drastically improved. Throughout the webinar, the speakers will provide the technical details behind USP and will reveal how it can enable specific use cases and applications.

Furthermore, Broadband Forum’s virtual booth will showcase the evolution of its CloudCO and Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) that will leverage a combination of Software Defined Networking (SDN) automation and virtualization, open source innovation and for the first time introduce User Services Platform (USP) functionality with remote Wi-Fi Closed Loop automation.

This virtual demonstration will bring together nine leading vendors and international test labs, open source initiatives and is supported by four of the world’s leading operators. The demonstration also takes advantage of major new enhancements to Broadband Forum’s OB-BAA open source project including demonstrations of its “white box” and virtual Optical Line Terminal (vOLT) approaches, vOLT with virtual ONU Management and Control interface (vOMCI), and management and control for the Access Domain, Edge Domain and subscriber premises.

Interested in joining Broadband Forum?

Watch the latest video of Rhonda Heier, Director of Membership Development, discussing the value of a Broadband Forum Membership.

If you’re interested in learning more about joining Broadband Forum, please contact Rhonda directly at rheier@broadband-forum.org.

If you join Broadband Forum, you will be able to access our previous webinar recordings. For all of our current members, you can view them here.