2021.07.30 – Open Broadband News

Parallel paths can lead to broadband convergence

Managing Director of Broadband Forum, Ken Ko spoke earlier this week at the Future of Fiber Technologies workshop about the range of fiber trends that are coming to fruition at the same time.

From disaggregation to network convergence and network slicing, 5G and ORAN, many fields are simultaneously seeing tremendous progress. “These parallel trends are really just becoming practical because of the huge amounts of bandwidth that the new fiber technology generations are bringing to the network. If you put extra lanes on a freeway, before you know it, you’ve got more cars,” Ko said.

Broadband Forum has a long history of specifying what’s necessary to provide a fixed network to consumers and small businesses, and the Forum are putting the focus not just on raw specifications but getting feedback from regional providers to find out what they need to bring value to that whole industry and Ko continued, “Additional new generations in fiber are coming in pace with the needs of users.”

Take a look at the interview in full here.

Bringing home 5G-Residental Gateways

The Broadband Forum webinar brought together the leading lights in the service provider and vendor community and those individuals that play a crucial role in contributing to the standards work across the globe. The insightful webinar delved into key Use Cases and aspects unique to Wireless Wireline Convergence (WWC) and enabling new services for devices in the home.

A key enabler of the 5G Residential Gateway (5G-RG) is multi-session, having the capacity to multiplex multiple sessions each as a unique connection between the 5G-RG and Access Gateway Function (AGF) on top of the customer VLAN.

The second key enabler is multi-access with the functionality of ATSSS (Access Traffic Steering, Switching, Splitting). This is based on the Residential Gateway with dual access, PON, DSL on the wireline side and 5G and LTE on the wireless side.

As a consequence of the global pandemic, an increased trend has been working from home, and this has driven innovation in the tooling to support it and has seen the deployment of corporate assets to facilitate this. The ability to enhance the work from home environment, is moving to the forefront.

Read the latest blog from David Allan, WWC Work Area Director and David Woolley, Outstanding Contributor for the BUS Work Area at the Broadband Forum in full here.

Big Spender: India requires $10 billion a year to bridge digital divide

India needs to invest up to $10 billion every year in data infrastructure to bridge the digital divide prevalent in the country, according to the former Department of Telecommunications (DoT) secretary JS Deepak.

“We must also realize the Universal Service Obligation Fund of the Department of Telecommunications alone is inadequate to finance this expenditure. The establishment of a broadband infrastructure fund with a corpus from private, multilateral and government sources, including spectrum auction revenues is a must,” Deepak said while speaking at a webinar on ‘Building the Digital Economy: Opportunities for Growth and Partnership’ organized by the Broadband India Forum.

Telecom companies are adopting new technologies such as virtualization, Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization (SDN/NFV), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, among others.

It’s off the chart! China sees growth in subscriptions and revenue per customer

 Driven by a continuous rise in high Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) subscriptions and FTTH average revenue per user, China’s fixed broadband service revenue is poised to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 3.6% between 2021 and 2026, a study revealed.

According to GlobalData, the fixed broadband penetration of the population will increase from 35.9% in 2021 to 39% in 2026 supported by the ongoing broadband network coverage expansions by operators such as China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom.

“Fiber will continue to be the top broadband technology in terms of subscriptions throughout the forecast period. This is backed by the aggressive approach and investments by state-owned firms like China Mobile and China Unicom for the expansion of gigabit fiber-optic network infrastructure in every part of the country with three years and 10 years of strategic plans namely ‘Dual-gigabit’ and ‘Gigabit Broadband Development Plan’,” said Kantipudi Pradeepthi, Senior Analyst at GlobalData.

Scream if you want to go faster

A team of researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan has set a new world record for Internet speed at 319 Tb/s. This beats the previous record of 178 Tb/s set last year by the University College of London.

The Japanese team has demonstrated S, C and L-band transmission over long-haul distances in a 4-core optical fiber with standard outer diameter (0.125 mm). The team, which was led by Benjamin Puttnam, constructed a transmission system that makes use of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology by combining different amplifier technologies, to achieve a transmission demonstration with data rate of 319 Tb/s, over 3,001km.

The standard cladding diameter, four-core optical fiber can be cabled with existing equipment, and it is hoped that such fibers can enable practical high data-rate transmission in the near-term, contributing to the realization of the backbone communications system, necessary for the spread of new communication services such as 5G and beyond. The results of this experiment were accepted as a post-deadline paper presentation at this year’s virtual OFC event.