2021.06.04 – Open Broadband News

How Broadband Forum’s TR-398 can be utilized directly for home router performance

Wi-Fi service providers seem to be forever in competition with one another, but they tend to be on the same team when it comes to identifying a common pain point: customer care calls and technician dispatches, also known as truck rolls.

The latter are particularly expensive, involving a variety of hidden costs: unbillable travel time, vehicle depreciation, and the opportunity costs associated with times when technicians are spread too thin to be available. There are, of course, a variety of more obvious costs as well, such as technician wages, vehicle fuel, maintenance, and so on. The key: testing to gauge the performance of Wi-Fi routers before they are made available to customers.

This is where a company like octoScope, a maker of isolated, repeatable and automated wireless personal testbeds, comes in. Such testbeds are designed to evaluate the behaviour and performance of wireless devices and systems, with scalability to support a single device under test (DUT) or multi-node mesh systems under test. The company recently announced its incorporation of the latest updates from the Broadband Forum, a non-profit industry consortium dedicated to developing network specifications.

The Broadband Forum maintains a standard for in-home Wi-Fi router performance known as TR-398. It is unique in the industry as a systematic and quantitative evaluation tool for home Wi-Fi router performance, which it gauges across seven dimensions: receiver sensitivity, throughput, coverage, multiuser support, anti-interference, stability and mesh networks

Catch up on the TeleSemana webinar exploring the integration of complementary copper technologies

In February this year the Broadband Forum published a new report to show operators how to revitalize their existing copper broadband networks and accelerate the deployment of faster Internet connections. The report showed how fiber-based access can be provided to homes and businesses using existing copper infrastructure rather than new fiber installation, which may not be economically or physically unfeasible.

Fiber to the Extension Point (FTTep) enables service providers to implement fiber services by leveraging the last few meters of copper to extend the fiber network without compromising quality compared to full fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks. Telecom operators and service providers can integrate complementary copper technologies such as Multimedia Access over Coax Alliance (MoCA), G.fast or G.hn and reuse existing telephone line and coaxial cables.

To register for a free account with TeleSemana, and to access the exclusive webinar, click here. Download the full recording here. Please note that the website text is in Spanish, but there should be an option to translate text upon loading up the webpage.

Bring on the bargains! Experts say that lower deployment costs could lead to more fiber installations

Fiber internet service is no longer as expensive for internet service providers to deliver, and ISPs may soon transition to a more fiber-centric model, according to principals Jack Burton and David Strauss of Broadband Success Partners.

The difficulty associated with installing fiber-based internet has long made it a costly enterprise for service providers to offer.

Service providers have relied on older coaxial and hybrid options to meet the demand for internet. Hybrid options, used by cable companies, include a fiber connection to a node outside of a residency, and then a coaxial cable running to the premises. But an increased demand for gigabit internet, alongside recent decreases in the costs associated with deploying fiber have made it a more viable option for service providers to consider offering, according to the consultancy.

Burton and Strauss believe that in today’s setting, with new developments in fiber technology that have minimized its deployment cost, as well as made it more durable and reliable, ISPs will soon turn to a purely fiber model in order to meet the growing demand for faster speeds.

The new normal! Report shows increased broadband use remains high

After surging last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, broadband data consumption appears to be coming in for a soft landing, albeit on much higher ground than before the pandemic hit, according to a new study.

In its latest quarterly Broadband Insights report, OpenVault found that overall broadband data usage actually slipped slightly in Q1 2021 from Q4 2020 levels as many people returned to their old work and school environments. But data consumption remained well above pre-pandemic levels, with monthly weighted average usage by US broadband households reaching 461.7 GB in Q1, up nearly 15% from 402.5 GB in the year-ago period even while down 4.3% from 482.6 GB in Q4 2020.

Analyzing the latest results, OpenVault executives point to the return of pre-pandemic seasonal patterns of broadband usage, with the first quarter typically one of the weaker ones of the year. “What’s happening is we’re seeing more normal seasonality,” said OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau. “We won’t see a repeat of April 2020 numbers.”