2021.02.12 – Open Broadband News

How QED puts broadband quality and performance at the forefront

Having reached more than half of the homes on earth with broadband, operators are faced with managing the experience of these users to further monetize their broadband experience. The industry has already achieved remarkable results when it comes to delivering high bit rates to the premises, so operators are now turning their attention to broadband performance and quality.

What end-users want is seamless broadband connectivity, so that their applications can work optimally, together. Broadband Forum’s Broadband Quality Experience Delivered (Broadband QED), is an initiative which helps to do just that, looking beyond conventional measurements to improve overall broadband experience and improve management of network latency, consistency, predictability and reliability. The initiative is gathering momentum and is providing operators with the tools they need to meet current user requirements.

The work of Broadband Forum comes at a critical time, as new applications place tremendous strain on networks. In an ideal world, the IP packets carrying the end user’s application, for example during a video conference, would traverse the network with zero delay and zero packet loss. However, no real network is perfect and so all packets will at some point get delayed or may even get dropped or ‘lost’. But help is at hand, as the Forum’s QED project uses Quality Attenuation methods to deliver greater insight into Quality of Experience (QoE) and application outcomes, by measuring the statistical distribution of delay and loss.

You can read the full blog at https://www.broadband-forum.org/putting-quality-and-performance-at-the-heart-of-broadband-experience-with-qed

Privacy of devices on broadband networks – a cause for concern?

The range and number of devices on broadband networks is causing problems in the internet-connected home, and internet service providers are only now beginning to get their hands around issues of “fragmentation” caused by this growth.

Results of a five-year survey laying out these challenges highlighted a secondary problem plaguing internet service providers globally: Consumer privacy. The consultancy firm Omdia laid out the results of their survey in a Wednesday webinar on The Future Telco-Connected Home” survey and hosted by the Broadband Forum.

The survey featured responses from broadband service providers regarding the primary issues facing their consumers, projected sectors of development, and future developments that will be necessary to sustain a connected home. The continued drive to eradicate fragmentation, developing data standards and privacy to maintain trust, and the development of open platforms where the three major issues that Omdia identified in the survey data.

Michael Philpott, research director at Omdia, said that open standards will help eradicate fragmentation. In this context, he was referring to the different vendors that sell hardware or software each being responsible for accomplishing the same objectives.

The report can be downloaded in its entirety from the Broadband Forum website.

Environmental impact of telecoms a priority, says the new Arcep head

The new president of France’s telecoms regulator Arcep has officially taken office, setting out as her priorities digital coverage of the whole country, an open internet. and environmental impact of technology.

President Emmanuel Macron nominated Laure de La Raudière as head of Arcep for a six-year term on 5 January. She is the first politician and first telecoms engineer to hold the post, has a degree from Télécom Paris university, and worked for Orange for 11 years. She has taken over from predecessor Sébastien Soriano.

In her first address to her new colleagues, De La Raudière called for “territorial equity” for both fixed and mobile. Her remit includes not only mainland France but also its overseas territories, from the Indian and Pacific oceans to the Caribbean and including French Guiana in South America, all legally part of France and the European Union. She said: “The health crisis has only amplified this issue, with the development of teleworking or distance education, or even online commerce, including for local businesses. Every French person, regardless of where they live, should not be deprived of high-performance internet access at a competitive price.”

In her political career, which started in 2007, she served on the Economic Affairs Committee of the Assemblée nationale, where she looked at digital coverage, blockchain, net neutrality and very high-speed broadband.

FFC chair tells comms industry to ‘think big, and act’

Acting FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, in making her debut speech to staff, has called for the communications industry to “think big, and act”. She argues that the future belongs to those connected.

Rosenworcel and most of the FCC’s staff are working from home because of the pandemic, and she said that she appreciated how challenging this was.

“It seemed like overnight our daily routines pivoted from commuting to the office to working from kitchen tables and living rooms. We’ve all had to adjust to new ways of being that help keep us safe”, said Rosenworcel. “As difficult as it is, this pandemic has also demonstrated how important our work is at the FCC. Because as a nation we need connections – physical and digital – that strengthen our mutual bonds. We benefit from communications that reach all and help us work, learn, be informed, enlightened, and entertained. And we need connections that can break down barriers that for too long have held too many back.”

She outlined the creation of the $3.2 billion Emergency Broadband Fund, funded by Congress: “Congress directed us to establish an Emergency Broadband Benefit to expand access to high-speed connections and assist those struggling in the ongoing economic crisis. It tasked the agency with expanded support for telehealth and provided funding that will make our networks more powerful and more secure.”

Shaping the Ran ecosystem – how OpenRan paved the way for innovation

OpenRan successfully expanded the Ran ecosystem and paved the way for innovation and competition through standardization. Now leading tier-1 operators Vodafone, Verizon, and BT are driving forward the promise of disaggregation, interoperability, containerization, and an App Store for the home. This collaboration between the member companies of Broadband Forum and the prpl Foundation, in the arena of Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), is beginning to take shape.

These leading operators believe that both Broadband Forum, responsible for device management protocol TR-069 – which has been deployed on more than a billion devices – and prpl Foundation, with its wealth of experience in open-source CPE platforms and standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), are the perfect team to build the OpenRAN of the home.

Why the comparison to OpenRAN? Well, the promises from the collaboration are much the same to OpenRAN. But it goes further and more in-depth by defining ways of containerizing and remotely managing software. They are planning to use this extensive experience to deliver disaggregation of software and hardware, and interoperability by defining a single, standardized API for CPE software and an open-source development platform. Ultimately, this means that any vendor could be added to an operator’s CPEs. This ensures a range of added functionality and a broadening of delivered services.

Sign up to download ‘The future Telco – Connected Home 2021 Survey report’ here and receive a recording of the Forum USP/ TR-369 virtual workshop series here.