2018.10.23 – Broadband Forum hosts Interop Pavilion at 2018 Broadband World Forum

• Operators: AT&T, BT, DT, TIM, Telstra, Vodafone
• Vendors: ARRIS International Plc, Ericsson, Huawei, Juniper, Nokia, Plume, SoftAtHome
• Software Consortia: prpl Foundation, Broadband Forum
• Ecosystem Partners: EANTC, QA Cafe, University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL)
• Analysts: Cartesian

USP and OB-BAA underline the increased collaboration, agility, and value that Broadband Forum is bringing to the broadband industry as it develops consensus around  next-generation networks. Its ongoing work integrates the latest and upcoming trends, such as virtualization and cloudification, to provide the basis for a broadband infrastructure which is equipped for the next era of services, from the connected home to 5G.

Open-source innovations and software-based projects have been embraced, while the business case for service providers remains at the center of Broadband Forum’s ethos. The organization now wants to further unify open-source and open standards.

“Two years ago, we brought together ten service providers to share their latest thinking on broadband networks and that set us off on a journey which has led us to the very exciting position we are in today,” said Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh. “By leveraging the best of both open source and open standards, we can map the innovation taking place on to service providers’ existing infrastructures, ensuring they can upgrade their networks cost-effectively and efficiently, with minimal disruption to end-users. With our Executive Workshop and ground-breaking solutions on show at the Interop Pavilion, Broadband World Forum 2018 will be the epicenter for a number of Broadband Forum hosted events that will shake the communications industry to its core.”

The demonstrations of USP and OB-BAA will follow the workshop, showcasing just some of the results achieved by Broadband Forum in the connected home space and in accelerating the deployment of cloud-based access infrastructure and services.

ARRIS, Greenwave Systems, and QA Cafe will demo USP, which evolves Broadband Forum’s globally-embraced TR-069 protocol to bring a unified approach for implementing, deploying and managing all types of devices in the connected home.

“The Broadband Forum USP is needed for any service provider seeking to embrace the opportunity, and overcome the complexity, of the modern connected home,” said John Blackford, member of the Broadband Forum’s Board of Directors and Co-Director of the Broadband User Services Work Area. “With advanced features like multi-tenant management and control, user self-management and control, enhanced privacy, and robust and secure communications, it is primed to meet the demands of an IoT world. Best of all, it can co-exist with TR-069 and was built on the TR-181 data model, making it both compatible and easy to migrate for the nearly 1 billion TR-069 installations that already exist.”

The OB-BAA demo will be provided by Huawei and Nokia and highlight the progress made within the Broadband Forum in embracing open source initiatives. OB-BAA enables standardized, automated and accelerated deployment of new cloud-based access infrastructure and services. The first code release and documentation from the initiative was published in August.

“OB-BAA facilitates co-existence and seamless migration, bringing the agility to adapt to a wide variety of software defined access models as they become defined by vendors and providers in a potentially vast market,” said Tim Carey, Chair of the BAA project. “Inherent in this project is the ability to pull differing access device types, including legacy implementation, together under a single network and service management and control umbrella to be exposed to management elements such as the SDN Management and/or Control and Element Management Systems. This project was designed to be deployed within the Broadband Forum’s CloudCO environment as one or more virtualized network functions, and thus can also be adapted and deployed in other virtualized environments.”

Other companies exhibiting within the Broadband Forum’s Interop Pavilion (located in Expo hall 22A, booth FA9 at Messe, Berlin) include Domos, Friendly Technologies, Intec, Kurth Electronic, LAN, MT2, Nokia, Piva Software, Sparnex Instruments, Telebyte, Tibit Communications, University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL), and Voltserver.

Further insight into the unification of open source and open standards will be provided by Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh during his keynote presentation “The New Broadband Network – Powered by Open Standards and Open Source.” This takes place as part of Broadband World Forum’s Open Telco track at 2.30pm on Wednesday, 24 October.

To participate in the Broadband Forum Executive Workshop, register here. For more information on the Broadband Forum’s work, please visit: https://www.broadband-forum.org