Broadband Forum News – April 2024

April 2024

The Headlines

• New heights reached for user services and live collaboration at 2024 USP Summit
• Why Quality Attenuation (∆Q) is the key to measuring better broadband
• Broadband Forum’s 5G FWA helping bridge the multi-tenant digital divide
• Call for Speakers: Smart Home and IoT Town Hall Innovation Series Summer 2024

CEO’s note

As we count down the days to our next Member Meeting in Incheon, South Korea, we would like to offer you the opportunity to submit a speaking proposal for our Town Hall Innovation Series that will focus on the smart home and IoT.

The number of high-bandwidth and IoT applications, such as video streaming, remote working, and gaming have multiplied within the home. This has pushed the broadband industry to look beyond just delivering reliable connectivity and speed. We look forward to exploring and discussing the themes that the smart home within the framework of a Multi-Service Broadband Network offers.

Stay tuned for more updates about our Summer Member Meeting.

-Craig Thomas CEO at Broadband Forum

CloudCO+ 2024 Demo and Town Hall Innovation Summit Opportunities!

• The CloudCO+ 2024 demonstrations, will provide a number of  use cases that go beyond  CloudCO and touch upon multiple Broadband Forum standards. Broadband Forum members can participate in these demonstrations and learn more here. Non-members can also express interest to participate and learn more about the demonstrations by contacting Rhonda Heier (rheier@broadband-forum.org)
• Following the success of the Spring Member Meeting that opened with the theme of AI and ML, Broadband Forum has announced that the focus of the Summer Member Meeting’s Town Hall Innovation Series will be the Smart Home and IoT. You can learn more and submit a proposal to speak at the meeting here.

News and Updates

• Last month, the Broadband Forum hosted three events in Mainz, Germany, that amassed a total of 243 registered attendees across five days. Events like the USP/TR-369 Summit serves as flagship reminders of the unique value in getting together with colleagues and diving deep into the progress, findings, and trends we’ve navigated towards delivering better user experiences. Jason Walls, Chair of the Broadband Forum Connected Home Council, and Director of Technical Marketing at QA Cafe captured the USP Summit’s key highlights here.
• Disruptive Analysis’ Dean Bubley provided a keynote speech as well as moderated a panel on in-building broadband distribution options at the BASe Technical Summit. You can read Dean’s overview of the considerations a service provider faces when bringing broadband to multi-dwelling units here.
• Lucy Hazell, Packet Flow Performance Analyst, PNSol, claimed that service providers need to be able to accurately measure their network’s performance in order to deliver better broadband at lower costs to ultimately satisfy customers. In a Broadband Forum blog, she discussed the importance of the Forum’s Quality of Experience Delivered (QED) project that uses ∆Q methods to deliver greater insight into QoE and application outcomes, by measuring the statistical distribution of delay and loss.
• Broadband Forum’s Wireless-Wireline Convergence (WWC) Work Area continues to progress a new project on Multi-Tenant 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and extend 5G FWA to serve MDUs with gigabit broadband connectivity. You can read more about the project to find out how it aims to tackle the multi-tenant digital divide in this blog by Helge Tiainen, InCoax Networks, and Michael Timmers, Nokia, WT-507 Editors; and Mike Talbert, Wistron NeWeb, Multi-Tenant FWA Project Stream Lead here.

Technology Spotlight

OB-CAS – Enabling Automation and Faster Time-to-Market

The objective of the Open Broadband-CloudCO Application Software Development Kit (OB-CAS) project is to lower the barriers for developers to embed their software applications in a CloudCO/access management environment, creating a network management application ecosystem for the broadband industry.

Building on existing open source standards and projects, this initiative will help operators automate operations, as envisioned in TR-486, Automated and Intelligent Management. Its open nature allows service providers to utilize the existing CloudCO operating environment, facilitate multi-vendor operation and choose best-of-breed solutions to optimize their operations.

Software application providers can integrate their cloud application running in a CloudCO environment. These applications can analyse – with optional support from AI – the network telemetry data that is accessible from the access domain controller via well-defined APIs. The processing of this data and the associated recommendations can result in improved user experience, reduced OPEX, or increased ARPU for the network operator.

Next to the development of the App SDK and its sandbox environment, the project team is also working on an alarm correlation application -which can result in faster troubleshooting performance. This sample application can then be integrated and demonstrated in a CloudCO environment using OB-CAS .

Learn more about how to participate and contribute to the OB-CAS project here.

Upcoming Events

• April 11- PON Interoperability vBASe Webinar
• May 9 – Future of the Connected Building vBASe Webinar
• May 14-16 – ANGA COM 2024 in Cologne, Germany
• May 21-23 – Network X Americas in Dallas, Texas
• June 17-20 – Summer Member Meeting 2024 and Town Hall Innovation Series in Incheon, South Korea

New Projects

• PHYtx: Architecture and Requirements for Fiber to the Distribution Point Issue 3 – Aims to create an architecture that gives operators access to a wider range of PON technologies when transforming in-building coaxial networks for broadband access. This delivers greater scalability within their deployments and a faster-time-to-market of services as time-consuming and costly fiber deployments can be avoided.
• ATA: Security Considerations for IPv6 Broadband Networks. –  Some ISPs are transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 to improve network communications efficiently, however, IPv6 presents some new security challenges. The project aims to provide development considerations and enhance IPv6 security measures for the communication of multiple devices over a network.
• Common YANG: Large System Management at Scale. – Large OLTs with many ONUs suffer impractical management performance due to their huge data storage size and the fact that data nodes on the OLT side, related to ONUs, are interleaved with other OLT data nodes. This project will provide a path forward towards interoperable cross-vendor OLT PON deployment especially when large OLTs are involved.
• Cross Work Areas: CloudCO 2.0 – Encompassing agile and service-driven networks as well as Cloud and AI, the project aims to provide an interoperable toolset of network solutions that optimize CAPEX, reduce OPEX and enable a faster time to market of products.

Welcome New BBF Members

FreeCast, prpl Foundation and Anlix.

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