Broadband Forum News
2018.11.27 – Open Broadband News
Amazon Voice Services to keynote Broadband Forum Q4 Meeting in Glasgow
Key influencer of the future of broadband and the Connected Home experience, Amazon Voice Services (AVS), will be keynoting the Monday plenary session of the Broadband Forum Q4 Meeting in Glasgow on Monday, December 10.
UK Country Manager Theunis Scheepers, will be bringing his vision for the Alexa-driven voice enabled broadband experience to the Forum and is looking for opportunities for collaboration with members.
This session, along with a keynote from UK communications regulator Ofcom, will set the stage for what should be a stellar Q4 meeting. Other highlights will include a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting on “Powering and Ultra-fast World” – a session focused on overcoming this key hurdles to rapid and remote broadband deployment – as well as a number of major advancements in key work areas.
It’s not too late to join us in Glasgow! For more information about the meeting, please visit:https://www.broadband-forum.org/news-events/meetings/current-meeting
TalkTalk launches new company for faster fiber rollout
TalkTalk has established a new company called FibreNation under an independent chair with the aim to roll-out fiber infrastructure to around three million UK homes and businesses, it has been announced.
The provider has also confirmed that the first three towns to benefit will be Harrogate, Ripon and Knaresborough, UK. This builds upon TalkTalk’s previous full fiber trial in York, and positions it as the first customer of FibreNation, wholesaling access to the network to sell full fiber services to its customers.
Tristia Harrison, Chief Executive of TalkTalk, said: “For too long, Britain has trailed the rest of the world when it comes to broadband speed and reliability. We’re determined to change that and invest in the faster, more reliable broadband Britain deserves. We are very confident in the asset we have created in York and will continue discussions with potential partners to agree a capital structure that reflects that. In the meantime, we’re accelerating our rollout plans.”
Openreach lists 81 new UK areas for Gfast ultrafast broadband
A further 81 new locations have been confirmed as the next to benefit from Openreach’s roll-out of 330Mbps capable hybrid fiber Gfast ‘ultrafast broadband’ ISP technology, which aims to cover 7.5 million UK homes and businesses by the end of 2020.
The GFast service works in a similar way to existing Fibre-to-the-Cabinet technology by running a fibre optic cable to a local PCP Street Cabinet, which is then fitted with an extension “pod” to house the line cards (this handles up to 48 ports, but it should eventually do 96). After that the service reaches your home via the existing copper cable.
Accelerating into 2019 – A summary of project area activities at the Q4 Glasgow meeting
Beyond the exciting keynotes and BoF segment at the Q4 Glasgow meeting, there will also be some major steps forward in each of the Broadband Forum’s major project areas. A brief summary of each is provided below:
- Connected Home: The Wi-Fi In-Premises Performance Test Plan, a first in the industry to establish carrier grade performance requirements for Wi-Fi Aps, is expected to proceed to final ballot out of this meeting. This test plan gives operators the tools to help select the best possible products for their networks. Also, expect a new proposal to start new open source work for the development of a USP (User Services Platform) agent reference implementation aimed at helping speed up adopted and roll-out of the BBF’s newest protocol that is poised for eclipse the wide success of the TR-069 protocol.
- CloudCO: Work will continue to focus on the definition of interfaces required to support the abstraction of the broadband access network. This meeting will also be the first official meeting of the new O&M Automation / Intelligence project stream, which will develop specifications for service providers to leverage AI and big data techniques within the operations and management processes.
- 5G: Work will focus on building on the great success of the October Interim meeting, where a number of the study documents were completed, and will be kicking off the normative work in those areas, including convergence and network slicing.
- Access | Next: A new proposal will be a focus in this meeting – the virtualization of the OMCI management function, allowing a further disaggregation of the OLT, and standardized interfaces between the physical OLT, SDN manager, and other abstraction layers (including the BBF’s open source BAA reference implementation).
- SPAC & BIG: The Service Provider Action Council (SPAC) and Broadband Innovation Group (BIG) will be hosting an open session led my Vodafone and PNSol focused on Innovative Quality Monitoring Techniques: ∆Q (a system performance analysis technique applicable to broadband networks that provides far greater insight than current techniques as a proxy for quality of experience and application outcomes).
It’s going to be a busy event, and a meeting you won’t want to miss! For more information about the meeting, please visit: https://www.broadband-forum.org/news-events/meetings/current-meeting
£6.35bn for UK broadband and 5G infrastructure upgrade by 2021
The UK government has published its National Infrastructure and Construction Pipeline report, which reveals the scale of public and private investment that is underway, or is expected, for 5G mobile and broadband ISP connectivity.
Overall, £6.85 billion is currently going toward 11 digital infrastructure projects across the United Kingdom.
The report also highlights how the different funding sources are split between projects and also offers a summary of pre-2018/19 funding.
Reliance Jio announces first 29 cities to get GigaFiber
Reliance Jio has revealed the first 29 cities to receive full fiber to the home (FTTH) gigabit broadband services, as part of its GigaFiber rollout.
The first towns to receive the services will be: Bangalore, Chennai, Ranchi, Pune, Indore, Thane, Bhopal, Lucknow, Kanpur, Patna, Allahabad, Raipur, Nagpur, Ghaziabad, Ludhiana, Madurai, Nashik, Faridabad, Coimbatore, Guwahati, Agra, Meerut, Rajkot, Srinagar, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Jodhpur, Kota and Solapur.
Open Fiber and Vodafone launch Novara FTTH service
The Open Fiber wholesale-only venture of Italian utility giant Enel and state lender CDP has announced that the first commercial fibre-optic offers using its network are now available in the Lombardy city of Novara following a total investment of around EUR 19 million.
Over 25,000 residents can already sign up to FTTH connections at speeds of up to 1Gbps via operator partner Vodafone Italia, said the company, with 13,000 more homes to be added in the coming months.
Last September, Open Fiber said it remained on track to meet its target of 4 million connected homes throughout Italy by the end of the year, rising to 19 million households and businesses by 2022 in a total investment of around EUR 6.5 billion.
For Press and Analyst inquiries, contact Proactive PR at broadbandforum@proactive-pr.com
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