How USP 1.2 is unlocking the full potential of the connected home market

How USP 1.2 is unlocking the full potential of the connected home market

By Jason Walls, QA Cafe, Chair of the Broadband Forum Connected Home Council and BUS Work Area Director

Since its inception, the Broadband Forum’s User Services Platform (USP/TR-369) is helping service providers manage the complex connected home environment. USP has created an interoperable ecosystem for the connected home and is one of the fastest-growing standards for connected device management and control in the industry. New business model opportunities can be seized thanks to USP’s ability to enable devices and applications from multiple vendors to deliver the new services and guaranteed network quality that end-users demand. This has also been shown to reduce subscriber churn and increase Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

With the ability to deploy, implement, and manage all aspects of the home network, USP allows service providers to truly benefit from further home network optimization (particularly Wi-Fi), and deliver these new broadband value-added services and smart home managed services. In the Broadband Forum and Omdia ‘The future Telco – Connected Home 2021 Survey report’, based on the service provider survey from 2020, 31% of respondents said that their companies had already implemented USP, with a further 45% saying that they expected to do so in the next 12 months.

According to the same report, three massive growth potential use cases were enabled by USP. This included managed Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi optimization, as well as new containerized services running on Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), such as virus/malware detection, online privacy detection, or parental controls, and smart home and IoT managed services. It is clear to see the rapid progress and mass adoption of USP. As we’ve seen through the increase in and diversity of Broadband Form participants, especially among new and interesting application and cloud vendors, our work on USP 1.2 is set to capitalize on this growth potential.

What is USP 1.2?

Successfully integrating advanced capabilities of Wi-Fi Data Elements™ from Wi-Fi Alliance®, Broadband Forum published the next versions of the Broadband Forum suite of standards for managed services. This included the publication of the 1.2 version of USP and 2.15 version of the widely adopted TR-181 Device Data Model. The publication of the 1.2 version of USP delivers a multi-vendor multi-application environment that ensures it is leading the way ahead of other solutions in the market.

The release of these standards provides new methods for managing and monitoring DOCSIS enabled Cable Modems (CM) and eRouters. The adoption of Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) as one of the most ubiquitous transport protocols drove us to add MQTT capability to the bulk data transfer mechanism. This allows mass telemetry – especially the new Wi-Fi Alliance Data Elements KPIs added to TR-181 Device:2.15 and the complete IoT sensor and control data model added in Device:2.13 – to be collected and gathered over MQTT easily and maximizes the utility of operators who use existing MQTT infrastructure for so many other things.

Open-source and standards collaboration = industry adoption

Demand has heightened for device management, and open standards are a key enabler to successfully managing connect devices faster and more efficiently.

Collaboration across the broadband ecosystem was experienced with an array of operators, vendor, chipset manufacturers, and management applications companies coming together to help develop these new standards. USP’s strength comes from standardization, open-source, and testing. This has allowed us to quickly adapt to field experiences, add new features, and clarify early design choices.

Rapidly adopted by operators, application vendors, other standards bodies, and open-source projects, 1.2 version of USP provides operators with a customizable, turn-key solution for adding Wi-Fi optimization and more to their overall service offering. This in turn, creates an enhanced user experience for the consumer. It’s evident that industry adoption and collaboration between standards organizations such as Broadband Forum, prpl Foundation, and the Wi-Fi Alliance is the secret ingredient for standards bodies making reliable, universally adopted technology.

You can learn more about the recent advancements in USP and TR-181 in our webinar, “Manageable, Optimized Subscriber Wi-Fi: the Latest Improvements to TR-181 Device:2.15 and the User Services Platform” that took place in February. Reach out to the Broadband Forum if you have any questions!