2021.12.10 – Open Broadband News

Taking broadband to the edge will deliver better user experience

A new breakthrough which will bring edge computing to cloud-based broadband networks will enable service providers to improve their customers’ Quality of Experience (QoE) while increasing their revenue streams. Broadband Forum’s TR-466 ‘Metro Compute Networking: Use Cases and High-Level Requirements’ is a framework defining a new metro-compute networking architecture, ensuring a greater user experience by moving applications or content towards the lower edge tiers in the network hierarchy.

The metro-compute networking architecture will include in-depth integration of computing and network on top of the cloud-based broadband network with the purpose of connecting isolated edge sites – such as Broadband Forum’s CloudCO – as one cloud to serve edge computing services.

“The latest release of TR-466 represents a big step for the industry as the standard will help cloud providers and operators overcome the routing and scalability challenges at the edge. Furthermore, it enables virtualization and disaggregation of edge elements and nodes to run applications in proximity to the customer where latency is important. This is particularly important for enterprise networks and will provide a shareable infrastructure for customers that can be seamlessly managed with reduced complexity,” said Broadband Forum SDN/NFV Work Area Co-Director George Dobrowski.

Wi-Fi 6 and mesh management – Is it a service provider necessity?

For operators, the number of connected devices in the subscriber network continues to grow, and our solutions need to grow with them. The industry has evolved to the point where constant access is a priority irrespective of location within a particular household. From a consumer perspective, QoE is the most important factor that will impact operators’ overall support costs and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). A pristine consumer experience will help grow your customer base and ARPU, but a bad experience can and will do the exact opposite.

Wi-Fi is understood to be one of the “choke points” where the customer experience is affected. For example, gamers still avoid Wi-Fi due to inherent latency limitations, yet wired solutions are not viable from an installation perspective. Unless we have good visibility into WLAN performance and the ability to manage the solution, then growth, and instantiation of services on Wi-Fi will be limited. New Wi-Fi technologies (such as Wi-Fi 6 and so called “Mesh or “Whole Home” systems) have helped to mitigate these issues. Mesh Wi-Fi or Whole Home Wi-Fi systems consist of a main router that connects directly to your modem, and a series of satellite modules, or nodes, placed around your house for full Wi-Fi coverage. They are all part of a single wireless network and share the same SSID and password.

This therefore helps give the end-user more coverage and a more seamless experience, but managing and optimizing an end-user’s Wi-Fi network based on analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is necessary to deliver on Service Level Agreements (SLAs), meet regulatory requirements, and ensure that pristine consumer experience.

How can industry standards help us? Find out by reading the full blog post by Donovan C.E Smith here.

How industry open standards are set to drive innovation in 2022

Over the past few years, the pace of technological progress has remained consistently impressive the world over. In 2025, it is estimated that more than 75 billion devices will be connected to the internet globally. In terms of actual usage, some estimates suggest that the minimum bandwidth required for modern digital activity in daily life is now 50Mb/s for most people and up to 100Mb/s for more advanced users. Naturally, as the time passes, the demand for high bandwidth applications is only likely to increase and these figures will increase accordingly.

The pandemic has played a part in accelerating this trend, with people working from home using document sharing and video call platforms daily, as well as students operating remote education applications throughout the day. As a result, it is imperative that there are systems in place to facilitate the kinds of high bandwidth applications we are seeing taken up, especially with a view to a high-quality user experience.

It’s clear that industry open standards and conformance certifications such as the BBF.247 G-PON Optical Network Unit (ONU) Certification Program are going to play a significant role moving forward when it comes to making deployments easier, increasing multivendor network interoperability and ultimately what this means in terms of supporting the greater broadband community.

Read the full editorial contribution from Broadband Forum’s Craig Thomas in the Fibre Systems Yearbook 2022 here.

Ready, steady, go! Broadband Forum’s latest release set to improve data automation!

Broadband Forum’s latest YANG data model has been released to aid the automation of the control and configuration of access network elements.

Amendment 4 of TR-383, Common YANG Modules for Access Networks builds upon the existing set of YANG data models, introducing improvements to Quality of Service (QoS) that address large scale deployments as well as providing statistics for debugging services.

Craig Thomas, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Business Development at Broadband Forum explained: “With demand for network capacity, particularly fiber deployments, growing consistently, operators are constantly looking for ways to make their operations more efficient and more cost-effective. Automating the configuration and control of network elements is one way of doing this but as a growing concept, ensuring interoperability has been and continues to be a key concern. This work addresses the challenge by ensuring interoperability between network components of different vendors to allow effective automation, defining YANG data models for functionality which is common across access network elements supporting various physical layer technologies.”

What does 2022 hold for the telco industry? Analysys Mason Research makes predictions

The Analysys Mason Research annual telecoms, media and technology (TMT) predictions highlight the major trends that it expects to make an impact in the next 12 months. This includes in summary:

• Many fixed broadband operators will launch connected home offerings
• Public cloud providers will gain a bigger role as the primary suppliers of important foundational technologies
• The pandemic-induced push for digital customer experience will accelerate telcos’ digital transformation projects

The research predicts that many fixed broadband operators will launch connected home offerings with services that are built on home Wi-Fi connectivity. When faced with competition from tech giants, operators’ smart home automation services and smart speaker offers have struggled, but the connected home is a promising area for operators. Operators will launch value-added services such as connected home cyber security and Wi-Fi motion detection with the objective of boosting subscriber numbers and ARPU.