2021.10.29 – Open Broadband News

Broadband Forum unveils new ground-breaking CloudCO capabilities

A cutting-edge Broadband Forum demonstration has showcased how operators can utilize industry standards and existing investments to achieve a virtualized infrastructure that enables zero touch provisioning, service activation and session steering within a multi-vendor and white box environment.

Bringing together leading service providers, vendors and interoperability labs at this year’s Broadband World Forum, the Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) project enables dynamic use cases, including multi-vendor service creation and activation and a truly virtualized disaggregated multi-vendor network.

“Dynamic session steering brings numerous benefits to a service provider’s business, allowing them to provide new and competitive service offerings with assurance capabilities that can seamlessly act on the network in a timely manner to ensure the assurance objectives of the service being offered.” said Tim Carey, Chairman of the Broadband Forum’s OB-BAA open source project.

The CloudCO framework is built from the ground up with components from the vendor community. To ensure full accessibility for participants, the demonstration was hosted both virtually and in-person to encourage safe participation during the Coronavirus pandemic. The full CloudCO demonstration video can be found here.

The road to lower costs & improved customer satisfaction is built on effective Wi-Fi testing

Poor signal, coverage, and performance – these Wi-Fi ‘experience killers’ within the subscriber network have been exacerbated over the past year or two with the switch to home working and schooling.

Service providers and operators need adequate tools to manage, to control, and to proactively understand and ensure the Quality of Experience (QoE) for their subscribers. They need the tools to leverage the available technologies effectively. One of the critical routes to achieving this is through devices being deployed into the field as part of providers’ overall service offerings.

Broadband Forum’s TR-398 Issue 2 is the latest release in wireless performance testing. TR-398i2 encompasses a set of performance tests and metrics in different scenarios and focuses on Wi-Fi router performance to help benefit broadband gateway vendors and service providers by lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction.

For more information about the BBF.398 Grade Wi-Fi program and how to have your product tested, please visit: BBF.398 Carrier-Grade Wi-Fi. Read the latest blog post in full from Broadband Forum Technical Chair Lincoln Lavoie here.

Turn that TV off! Pay-TV subscriptions fall to 71 percent in the US

Findings from Leichtman Research Group’s study, ‘Pay-TV in the U.S. 2021’, indicate that 71 percent of TV households nationwide have some form of pay-TV service. The percentage of TV households that have a live pay-TV service (via cable, satellite, Telco, or Internet-delivered vMVPD) is down from 82 percent in 2016, 87 percent in 2011, and 86 percent in 2006.

Reflecting this decline, in TV households 64 percent of adults aged 18-44 and 77 percent of those aged over 45 have a pay-TV service. Comparatively, in 2016, 77 percent of adults aged 18-44 and 86 percent of those aged over 45 had a pay-TV service.

“The percent of US TV households with a live pay-TV service significantly declined from 82 percent to 71 percent over the past five years,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group. “The penetration of pay-TV remains lowest among younger adults and the categories that they tend to populate, including movers and renters.”

The ‘Squid Game’ rages on as Netflix hits back at SK network costs lawsuit

Netflix is digging in after Squid Game resulted in a courtroom drama earlier this month. At the start of October, SK Broadband sued Netflix, demanding it pay to use its network after Hwang Dong-hyuk’s drama series and other hits caused data traffic to spike.

The case came weeks after Squid Game became an unexpected international breakout hit – and the broadband operator complained that Netflix used 24 times as much network traffic that month than in May 2018. In the month of Squid Game’s release, Netflix was generating 1.2 trillion bits of data per second, and SK had to upgrade its network twice, says the operator.

“A single broadband player in Korea is seeking to use its dominance to extract an arbitrary payment from streaming services like Netflix,” Dean Garfield, Netflix’s Vice President for global public policy, said in a statement. “Imposing network usage fees would create an unfair, anti-competitive environment, and it would limit the ability of customers to get what they want if prices become prohibitive and freeze out streaming providers.”

Good news! India introduces regulations to make fiber deployments easier

India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has revised the Indian Telegraph Act Right of Way (RoW) rules to make it easier to install aerial optical fiber cables in the country. This will help service providers in quickly deploying the required infrastructure for the upcoming 5G rollout.

Indian operators have been demanding a change in the RoW regulations for several years now. The country has complex RoW regulations, with different rules and charges for different states and districts. Further, approvals from several departments make it extremely tough to build optical fiber infrastructure for broadband – one of the key reasons there is minimal optical fiber networks in the country.

“Optical fiber is a fundamental and structural part of both mobile and fixed broadband networks. Faster rollout of fiber is important for backhauling a large amount of data at high throughput, improving reliability and reducing latency,” said the Digital Infrastructure Providers Association.

Content consumption stats still rocked by Pandemic, according to report

Insider Intelligence, in collaboration with Publicis Media-Starcom and GWI, has published its annual Global Media Intelligence Report on key digital trends worldwide, designed for business executives who require comparable consumer usage data to support their decisions for global initiatives. A few findings of the report included:

• Ownership of PCs and/or tablets continues to fall in many countries. Smartphones are already the primary – and sometimes the only – digital device owned by many internet users around the world. As advanced handsets continue to consolidate that position, larger-screen devices may be destined for a secondary role.
• Smart TVs are gaining ground as high-quality in-home entertainment becomes a must-have. In all but a handful of countries, smart TV ownership rose by several percentage points year over year.
• Adoption of other smart products has accelerated. In 2020, a small minority of internet users polled owned a smartwatch, but momentum was building. That trend continued this year, with penetration climbing significantly in most countries.

Jason Mander, chief research officer at GWI, added: “We have been paying close attention to the impact the pandemic has had across the planet. For the second year in a row, we see the pandemic as a major influence on both media consumption and device ownership. Some countries have been affected more intensely or differently this year than last.”