Fostering multi-vendor interoperability with Gfast

Fostering multi-vendor interoperability with Gfast

By Herman Verbueken, Director of Broadband Forum’s Physical Layer Transmission Work Area

As the digital appetite grows and grows, delivering ultrafast broadband to end-users is at the top of every service provider’s agenda. Technologies are evolving quicker and quicker, with new applications such as Virtual Reality, cloud services for business and UHD streaming, demanding increased bandwidth to ensure they are widely adopted.

Addressing the last mile – that all important section of the network that reaches the premises – is key to achieving high speeds and the extra capacity needed to give consumers the bandwidth they crave for the plethora of new applications coming to the fore. This is where Broadband Forum’s Physical Layer Transmission Work Area steps in.

A connected ecosystem

Broadband Forum is taking an important role in developing standardized interoperability and certification with its Physical Layer Transmission Work Area. By creating standardized interoperability and certification, a trusted base of equipment is built. For operators this brings accelerated time to market, avoiding large investments in time and customizations. For developers and implementers, interoperability provides invaluable feedback to improve and develop new products and services, and for the end-user it means more choices in devices and services at the lowest possible cost.

One solution enabling the industry to deliver on this is Gfast, the gigabit broadband access technology that allows operators to diversify their tools for delivering gigabit speeds and excellent performance, without having to invest in costly network overhauls. The Physical Layer Transmission Work Area provides the test plans, technical documentation, and marketing papers to enable such multi-vendor interoperability.

Gfast interoperability test suite

Interoperability remains key to unlocking the mass deployments that will make evolving technologies successful and Broadband Forum’s Technical Reports and certification program play a significant role in enabling this. The Physical Layer Transmission Work Area has developed a suite of specifications that support Gfast interoperability, such as TR-380 which provides a set of performance test cases and related pass or fail requirements for such implementations. The performance tests defined in TR-380 complement the testing requirements defined within the Broadband Forum’s Gfast certification program and its associated ATP-337 test plan.

In addition, the technical report, TR-338 Reverse Power Feed (RPF) test plan, specifies a set of test cases and related pass or fail requirements for reverse powering (RPF) of remote network nodes (Gfast DPUs, single-port or multi-port) from customer premises equipment (one or multiple CPEs). Specifically, it defines functional and safety test cases for Power Source Equipment (PSE) and Power extractor (PE) implemented according to ETSI specification TS 101 548 and BBF TR-301.

Looking ahead, the Physical Layer Transmission Work Area is working on the next issue of TR-380, targeting performance requirements for Coaxial Gfast deployments, as well as setting Gfast performance criteria for operation on cables with multiple twisted pairs.

Unlimited opportunities

With many of our members playing an active role in supporting the development of Gfast, the ongoing work will ensure that operators can be confident that Gfast technology is universally accepted and capable of reaching its full potential to address the challenges currently facing the industry. A range of manufacturers have already had their Gfast products certified, and the list is only growing. This growth is an encouraging indicator that the unlimited opportunities that lie ahead in an ultrafast broadband world will be taken, and in a way that equally benefits the industry, customers and emerging new markets that demand bandwidth.

By providing multi-vendor interoperability, Broadband Forum ensures that new services and technologies are introduced quickly, reliably and effectively, enabling the broadband industry to deploy equipment that will provide a better quality of experience for their end users while tapping into new revenue streams.

To gain further insight into what the Physical Layer Transmission Work Area is doing, visit: https://wiki.broadband-forum.org/display/BBF/Physical+Layer+Transmission.