2022.07.22 – Open Broadband News

Broadband Forum specs offer operators more CPE freedom

All these years on, and despite so many changes designed ostensibly to foster competition between vendors, most operators still struggle with vendor lock-in issues. That’s why the industry should applaud new specifications from the Broadband Forum that are designed to help operators deploy multiple broadband Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that can easily hook up to their network Optical Line Terminals (OLTs), the network-based systems that link to multiple CPE units via fiber, instead of taking everything from a single vendor (either because of convenience, cost or because the OLT only works with the same vendor’s CPE units).

Broadband Forum, which is renowned for its development of widely deployed industry specifications for the fixed broadband access networking sector, hopes the new specs will further encourage competition in the market for Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) home gateways/CPE, lower costs, reduce complexity, and enable interoperability between Optical Network Units (ONUs, the CPE devices for Fiber-To-The-Premises deployments) from different vendors. Operators will, in theory, benefit from quicker and cheaper onboarding of new ONUs from different vendors and more easily migrate and evolve their networks.

Bruno Cornaglia, Co-Director of the SDN/NFV Work Area at the Broadband Forum commented: “The latest specification can be used in the evolution of the management of ONUs, not as a replacement for the management processes and data models already in use by operators but to future-proof their infrastructure while maintaining their investment in existing ONU devices. Ultimately, ONU management will be more adaptive to changes in operators’ processes and services, as well as less costly to maintain.”

Consult Red Announces Membership To Broadband Forum

Consult Red has announced its membership to Broadband Forum. The work of the Broadband Forum is central to the development of open industry standards and an accelerated broadband ecosystem globally.

Rahul Mehra, Chief Technology Officer, Consult Red commented: “We’re proud to be an active participant in the Broadband Forum as it continues to drive innovation, growth, and interoperability within the industry. Membership enables us to collaborate and contribute to working projects that span 5G, Connected Home, Cloud, to help define best practices as we continue to expand our IoT capabilities.”

“We are delighted to welcome Consult Red as a new member of Broadband Forum and we look forward to their future contributions,” said Ken Ko, Managing Director at Broadband Forum. “By working with other technology vendors and service and app provider members in the Broadband Forum’s Broadband User Services (BUS) and other Work Areas, it will ensure that Consult Red can collaborate with the open standards and open-source community to develop new best practices and solutions for broadband connected devices and lifecycle management.”

Dell’Oro Cuts Forecast on Private Wireless Networks by a Fifth

Dell’Oro Group has advised that private wireless radio access network (RAN) shipments and revenues were again coming in below expectations, resulting in a “near-term downgrade.”

The analyst firm now projects that annual revenue from private wireless LTE/5G small cells – hardware only – will reach between $800 million and $1 billion by the end of its 2022-26 forecast period.

“We have chopped the small cell portion of private wireless by about a fifth throughout the forecast period,” Stefan Pongratz, VP and analyst with Dell’Oro, told Light Reading. “To be clear, the demand for private wireless is growing but just not as fast as we initially expected.”

High hopes for Nigeria’s first fiber optic cable manufacturing factory

Given the growing requirement for fiber across Africa and the problem some African countries have with copper theft, it may perhaps be a surprise to learn that a fiber optic cable manufacturing factory recently inaugurated in Ogun State, in Nigeria’s South-West region, is West Africa’s first and only the fifth in the entire continent.

The new development is expected to boost innovation and the development of Nigeria’s digital economy infrastructure.

According to the Business AM website, George Onafowokan, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Coleman Technical Industries Limited, said the project was a response to the Federal Government’s call for rapid development of digitalization penetration in Nigeria.

FCC calls 25 Mbps ‘broadband’ speed, the push is on to up it to 100

Under the current definition, set by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015, internet service counts as “broadband” if it delivers download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second (or Mbps) and upload speeds of at least 3 Mbps.

Seven years and one worldwide health disaster later, all eyes are on the FCC to see if it will change that definition again. Last week, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed raising minimum broadband speeds in the United States to 100 Mbps for downloads and 20 Mbps for uploads in a notice of inquiry shared with her fellow commissioners as part of an annual internet service evaluation.

“Everything in our homes is connected,” said Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel at Consumer Reports. “A lot of consumers are now realizing, ‘It’s my fridge, it’s my home security system, it’s my kids on all their devices.’ And it is the TV, and it is computers. I think, if anything, we can now appreciate how much speed you need is not for one device.”