2021.10.08 – Open Broadband News

Broadband Forum launches latest Open Source project to bring full benefits of 5G to fixed-line services

The goal of a new Broadband Forum project, Open Broadband – WWC Reference Implementation for 5G-RG (OB-5WWC) is for vendors and operators to bring products to market in a shorter timeframe and enjoy reduced development times and cycles. The Open Source project will bring the full benefits of the 5G ecosystem to fixed-line services and offer a full end-to-end solution to operators.

OB-5WWC aims to create a reference implementation of the Broadband Forum specified Wireless Wireline Convergence solution for 5G capable Residential Gateways (5G-RGs) and builds on the important Broadband Forum and 3GPP specifications already available. The founding members from BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone UK had a formal kick off meeting last month.

“The formation of the OB-5WWC project will help to fulfil the need for 5G and fixed-line convergence that is now viewed as a fundamental need, and will ensure the full benefits of the 5G ecosystem can be realized,” said Broadband Forum OB-5WWC Project Leader David Woolley. “We have already received strong support from the service provider community and are calling for all interested parties across the industry, including customer premises equipment (CPE) manufacturers, end-to-end integrators, and hardware and software vendors, to join the project and share ideas.”

For any interested parties (including non-Broadband Forum members) that wish to be part of the project, please sign the project participation agreement online here.

It’s standard! First suppliers achieve key BBF.398 recognition

Broadband Forum has revealed Altice Labs and Calix as the first two suppliers to be listed as part of its newly launched BBF.398 Grade Wi-Fi Program. The Forum said the move will be welcomed by service providers and product manufacturers in being able to reduce the number of customer complaints they receive about poorly performing devices.

A recently published Broadband Forum report, The future telco – connected home 2021 survey, in partnership with Omdia, highlighted the fact that customer dissatisfaction around Wi-Fi experience is becoming a growing driver of customer churn. It noted that any service calls related to the customer network can be costly and may lead to further operational expenses through engineer call-outs or equipment replacements.

“Issue 2 builds on the foundations laid by TR-398 – the industry’s first open Wi-Fi performance testing programme – in allowing operators to efficiently test Wi-Fi performance, capacity, coverage and stability,” said Lincoln Lavoie, University of New Hampshire Interoperability Principal Engineer and Broadband Forum Technical Chair. “The performance test plan measures an access point’s performance against the growing expectations of service providers to make sure devices used in their deployments are meeting customer needs and expectations.”

Testing! Industry collaboration marks “important milestone” for DBNG

A vocal proponent of open RAN in wireless, Vodafone is now looking to apply the same principle of disaggregation to the broadband network gateway (BNG), a move it said will make it easier to deploy, scale new features and add capacity for users. The operator teamed with Nokia, Cisco, Casa Systems and Benu Networks on what it claimed was the first test of the Broadband Forum’s TR-459 standard, which enables control and user plane separation (CUPS).

Ken Ko, Managing Director of Broadband Forum, told Fierce Telecom that the BNG has traditionally been a “monolithic piece of equipment,” meaning operators might have to purchase a second BNG if they want to scale up or add capacity. This in turn could leave them with control plane capacity they don’t need but paid for anyway.

But with a disaggregated BNG, operators can deploy the control and user planes in a new way, centralizing the former and distributing the latter to reap a myriad of benefits, Ko said. For instance, the user plane can be deployed closer to the customer, delivering improved performance for users and giving the operator the option to scale in more flexible increments.

Additionally, by centralizing the control plane, operators not only gain scale benefits, but can also eliminate the need to set up a control plane for each individual BNG that’s rolled out. Ko pointed to improved resilience and streamlined orchestration as two other benefits of the disaggregated BNG. Ko said the test “is a really important milestone,” adding “just the fact that we’ve got all of these players working together on this test shows that we’re getting to real deployable solutions.”

What’s that coming over the telco hill? It’s Wi-Fi 6!

5G may now be a real force in most advanced markets as carriers roll out the necessary infrastructure and switch on more coverage. But that doesn’t mean that network operators have fallen out of love with Wi-Fi in expectation of 5G picking up much of the Wi-Fi role. Far from it. In its latest Wi-Fi 6 guise, Wi-Fi may be more popular with network operators and users than ever before.

According to the Wireless Broadband Alliance, one of the bodies that advocates for Wi-Fi investment and helps influence standards, 83% of service providers, equipment manufacturers and enterprises worldwide will have deployed Wi-Fi 6/6E or plan to do so before the end of 2022 (6E is the version that will take advantage of the extra spectrum allocation available in the US and elsewhere).

WBA’s findings also include:

• More than 338 million Wi-Fi 6E devices will enter the market this year
• Nearly 20% of all Wi-Fi 6 device shipments will support 6GHz by 2022
• It also provides an update on Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), also known as Extremely High Throughput (EHT). Wi-Fi 7 is projected to support up to 30 Gbps throughput, about three times faster than Wi-Fi 6. WBA expects these devices to make their market debut in 2025.

Wow! India’s enterprise networking market surges to 14.1% in Q2 2021

Irrespective of the second wave of COVID, India’s networking market, which includes Ethernet Switch, Routers, and WLAN segments, witnessed a reasonable 14.1% year-over-year (YoY) growth in terms of vendor revenues during Q2 2021 (April – June).

According to a study by International Data Corporation (IDC), the increased YoY growth could be attributed to the weak base last year caused by the first wave of the pandemic. However, Indian enterprises continued to invest in network infrastructure and the overall vendor revenues grew 5.6% sequentially irrespective of the second wave of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, switching business in India had a strong 20.9% YoY growth during Q2 2021. The very high growth could be attributed to a very slow Q2 2020. However, the non-DC switching business, which remained slow due to the shutdown of campuses grew by 38.5% YoY, anticipating the hybrid work trend to be prevalent in the new normal. Key industries that contributed to the switching business include professional services, telecommunications, process manufacturing, and banking.