New heights reached for user services and live collaboration at 2024 USP Summit

New heights reached for user services and live collaboration at 2024 USP Summit

Jason Walls, Chair of the Broadband Forum Connected Home Council, and Director of Technical Marketing at QA Café

This article is a shortened version of Jason’s original blog that can be read here.  

Events like 2024’s USP/TR-369 Summit serve 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.

Along with making technology that is really helping people, from operators and end-users to engineers, the highpoint of this industry comes from the live shared experiences and collaboration with peers. Here are some highlights from 2024’s USP Summit at Broadband Forum’s Spring Member Meeting as we took full advantage of the opportunity to investigate what’s being built, inspired, and delivered as use cases through the User Services Platform (TR-369) and its comprehensive data model for connected devices (TR-181).

Operators are transitioning from TR-069

Tzvi Skapinker from Friendly Technologies set the stage for why transitioning from TR-069 to USP should be done (and why it’s not as hard as you think!) regarding both efficiency and new use cases.

Tzvi Skapinker of Friendly discussing the transition from TR-069 to USP

Daniel Egger from Axiros dove right into the different ways to have TR-069 and USP co-exist in deployment. He covered three main cases for this: using TR-069 for legacy use cases, using USP on new devices only, and having both TR-069 and USP running on the same device. Daniel is the project stream leader, along with Matthieu Anne from Orange, for the entire USP data model work.

Two major operators gave us full details on how they are using USP in their networks right now. Volker Effelsberg from Deutsche Telekom demonstrated how scalable USP is and, notably, how it was being used in conjunction with TR-069 for existing use cases, using USP for home analytics, customer support, and more.

Marcel Sponer from Vodafone demonstrated how the operator uses almost everything USP can do in different capacities: onboarding, support, and application deployment/lifecycle management – showing a commitment to using it wherever and whenever possible. Isaac Trigo Conde from Incognito Software Systems told us about a successful deployment of 5G Fixed-Wireless gateways empowered by USP for an anonymous operator.

Jason with Isaac Trigo of Incognito

Value-added services are a broad topic, but operators want them

Another trend picked up from the speakers and roundtable discussions was that value-added services – whether or not containerized applications on the gateway enable them – were what operators were looking for going forward, all easily enabled by USP. The term’s breadth was important here: operators are looking to differentiate not just on new services but by offering better support and interaction with customers about their connectivity.

Security and better customer support were definitely top items, with Tom Gaffney of F-Secure Corporation talking about not only the critical need for better security in the home network, but how easy and fast it is to build and deploy those services now with USP and containerized apps. Bjørn Ivar Teigen of Domos was clear about exactly how easily an app can be built for network latency management. Troy Cross from Ozmo showed just how powerful and simple customer support can be using USP under the surface.

The architecture for building these new application-enabled broadband services, powered by USP in the home gateway, was the main driver for these conversations. Vantiva’s John Blackford, a stalwart in this arena, gave a great overview of how this architecture works and what is coming.

The topic was not lost attendees, coming up a few times: What will we call this new device that goes far beyond just acting as a router? How will consumers engage with these products and the operators that provide them, compared to how they have in the past?

Bringing it all together in the real world

I think by far the most engaging parts of the USP Summit were our roundtable discussions and we were keen to involve the audience as much as possible and keep these sessions conversational.

Our operator roundtable included Chen Li of AT&T , Wojtek Makowski of Orange, Arne Schulz of Vodafone, and Volker Effelsberg of DT once again. Our conversation focused once more on the transition from TR-069 to USP and the major challenges of device management now and in the future.

This segued us perfectly into our open-source roundtable, featuring John Blackford, Wojtek Makowski, and Peter Steinhaeuser from embeDD Systems. We hit on the key pillars of successful technology: standards, open-source, and testing. After QA Cafe and CDRouter were praised for making the testing part easy and accessible, we talked about how necessary it is for standards and open-source to work together, calling out the close work between prpl Foundation and the Broadband Forum, as well as the ease in which operators working with RDK have been able to use USP in their solutions. We also talked about the dangers of using solutions without standards and how many operators are still feeling the repercussions of those decisions now.

Keep up to date with the lates USP Summit, and other Broadband Forum in-person meetings, here: https://www.broadband-forum.org/events