2021.02.26 – Open Broadband News

Join our Telco Connected Home survey: Key findings and conclusions webinar series!

When –March 4^th and 16^th, at 10am EST

Following the success of the recently published January 2021 ‘Future Telco-Connected Home Survey’ we would like to invite you to our follow up webinars that will go into more depth and drive the conclusions based on service provider real life use cases and deployment trends. Tackling key Connected Home trends and subjects such as:

• What the opportunities for Wi-Fi managed home or business will look like in 2021, and what technology advancements are supporting this?

• How will service providers enable and meet the demands of ever-increasing growth in device management inside the home, and what the demands of smart home, other IoT and application service providers mean to the telco operator plans.
• What is the opportunity for homeworking as well as residential services and delivering a quality of service to meet specific application service demands?

Speakers announced for the March 4^th webinar are Dmitri Vellikok from F-Secure and Jeevithan Muttu, from Incognito. Earlier this week, Michael Shaw, Chief Executive Officer at Axiros and Tuncay Cil from ASSIA gave their expertise on the Connected Home survey results.

Missed this week’s webinar? Don’t worry! You can still catch up by registering your interest to receive a slide deck and series recording here.

Register for the webinars here!

Bridging the gap between copper-based and fiber-based gigabit service deployments

The deployment of fiber deeper and deeper into broadband networks is restricted by cost and logistical issues, rather than the technology itself. Installing fiber to every household can involve significant labor costs, be disruptive to customers and can often be delayed due to the lengthy process of approvals from building owners or local authorities.

To reduce expense and complexity of deploying fiber networks, industry players are considering options of leveraging existing copper infrastructure and reusing existing network operators’ assets, while still providing Fiber to the home (FTTH)-like broadband connectivity. This can be achieved by extending the fiber network with copper-based infrastructure to provide multi-gigabit access into the home/ business. Such architecture is called the Fiber to the extension point (FTTep). FTTep vs FTTdp.

The main objective of the FTTep is to extend fiber-based gigabit services by re-using existing copper infrastructure, which can be Point-to-Point (P2P) or Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP). In many areas, the cost and complexity of deploying this architecture may be lower than for the fiber-only FTTH architecture, thus providing a simpler, faster and more economic deployment.

TR-419 defines the overall architecture of a FTTep network and describes the main location features and principals as well as various deployment and migration options. Key points from the large number of use cases brought forward by different operators and vendors, describing the detailed functional requirements, are also provided. TR-419 can be viewed in full here.

Alethea joins Broadband Forum to ‘perfect broadband’

Alethea Communications Technologies Pvt Ltd has joined Broadband Forum, the communications industry’s leading organization focused on accelerating broadband innovation, standards, and ecosystem development. This is with an aim to help organizations test and validate their next generation of wireless technology products through Alethea’s tools.

Alethea’s mission is to ensure that every consumer is able to experience broadband as expected. Their products combine scale testing with application experience. In short, emulating 100s of stateful Wi-Fi clients (legacy to latest Wi-Fi 6 / Wi-Fi 6E technologies) running real, stateful applications to recreate real world scenarios takes just a few clicks. The Wi-Fi ecosystem can now recreate most of the common user scenarios at scale in the lab and understand the challenges and issues users see in the field.

“Broadband Forum is excited to collaborate with Alethea on our mutual mission to improve end-user broadband experience and its contributions to our standardization initiatives,” said Broadband Forum’s Managing Director Ken Ko. “Alethea joins Broadband Forum at an exciting time for both the organization and telecoms industry. The urgency of the delivery and management of multi-devices, IoT and assuring the fiber experience across the Wi-Fi network has been accelerated.”

Broadband Forum points to harnessing copper for fiber benefits

Broadband Forum’s latest technical report has highlighted how fiber-based access could be provided using existing copper infrastructure instead of installing fiber to end-users’ premises.

This could help ensure that homes and businesses have access to faster, more reliable broadband connectivity by harnessing the copper infrastructure.

The Fiber Access Extension over Existing Copper Infrastructure (TR-419) report shows how this method could be used where FTTP may not be economically or physically viable. Instead, FTTep lets service providers deploy fiber-grade services by leveraging the last meters of copper to extend the fiber network without lowering quality when compared to complete FTTH networks.

The TR-419 report extends the Forum’s previous TR-301 which defines functionality for ITU-T G.fast distribution point units. It describes a number of use cases and migration options that can be considered as representative deployment scenarios for the operators choosing to implement a FTTep solution, and focuses on architectural, management and operational aspects of PON fiber access extension over different copper underlying technologies such as G.fast, G.hn Access and MoCA Access.

The full TR-419 report can be viewed here.

Tech and media juggernauts join forces to form standards group

A group of influential technology and media companies has partnered to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a Joint Development Foundation project established to address the prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through developing technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content.

Founding members Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic seek to establish a standardized provenance solution with the goal of combating misleading content.

C2PA member organizations will work together to develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media, including images, videos, audio and documents. These technical specifications will include defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified.

Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft said: “There’s a critical need to address widespread deception in online content — now supercharged by advances in AI and graphics and diffused rapidly via the internet. Our imperative as researchers and technologists is to create and refine technical and sociotechnical approaches to this grand challenge of our time. We’re excited about methods for certifying the origin and provenance of online content. It’s an honor to work alongside Adobe, BBC and other C2PA members to take this critical work to the next step.”

5G could reach nearly half of South Africa by 2025, according to report

Although 5G is still in its infancy in South Africa, it could see 11 million subscribers and 43% population coverage by 2025, compared to just 4% now.

This is according to the 2021 South Africa 5G Market Outlook Report from Africa Analysis, a SA-based ICT market research and analysis firm, which gives some predictions of how the 5G market is likely to evolve in the country over the next several years. The potential growth is significant compared to the estimated 90,000 subscribers and 4.4% population coverage for 5G at the end of 2020.

“5G is expected to continue building on the 4G (LTE) services but additionally enable a far broader range of use cases and new technologies. It will even enable the use of robots to perform an array of tasks presently performed by humans – something we have been reading about in science fiction novels for decades,” said Dobek Pater, Director of Business Development at Africa Analysis.