Shaping the OpenRan of the home

Shaping the OpenRan of the home

By Magnus Olden, CTO at Domos

OpenRan successfully expanded the Ran ecosystem and paved the way for innovation and competition through standardization. Now leading tier-1 operators Vodafone, Verizon and BT are driving forward the promise of disaggregation, interoperability, containerization and an App Store for the home. This collaboration between the member companies of Broadband Forum and the prpl Foundation, in the arena of Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) is beginning to take shape.

These leading operators believe that both Broadband Forum, responsible for device management protocol TR-069 – which has been deployed on more than a billion devices – and prpl Foundation, with its wealth of experience in open-source CPE platforms and standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), are the perfect team to build the OpenRAN of the home.

A fruitful collaboration

Why the comparison to OpenRAN? Well, the promises from the collaboration are much the same to OpenRAN. But it goes further and more in-depth by defining ways of containerizing and remotely managing software. They are planning to use this extensive experience to deliver disaggregation of software and hardware, and interoperability by defining a single, standardized API for CPE software and an open-source development platform. Ultimately, this means that any vendor could be added to an operator’s CPEs. This ensures a range of added functionality and a broadening of delivered services.

From there, standardization ensures enhanced interoperability across suppliers and operators addressing the notable pressure point for challengers, start-ups and innovators. Software developers will only need to develop once and thereafter will be able to deploy anywhere. This is a win-win proposition that could reduce costs, speed up innovation and introduce a diversification of supply. As the software gets disaggregated, more equipment can be upgraded remotely and increased functionality can be achieved.

Rapid Innovation

We’ve already seen the potential for containerization erupt when Rakuten launched its containerized 5G platform and this project does not trail too far behind. Creating a containerized environment and standardizing what 3^rd party software will talk to, and how it is installed, managed, upgraded, and isolated within a container will allow for much-needed flexibility and security. This progress will not only reduce costs but opens the door for rapid innovation.

But the status quo of months of engineering and testing involved to deploy a 3rd party application strangles many innovative solutions before they ever get introduced to the market. By isolating software, it can be safely tested in a much shorter timeframe.

Revenue streams unlocked

The prpl Foundation and Broadband Forum’s collaboration does not stop at containerization. Broadband Forum has the understanding and expertise to know how to remotely manage devices, with the project extending the management protocol in such a way that it can also effectively and remotely manage containers.

A remote management protocol can be used to manage containers and several vendors have showcased App Stores for the home using the new standards. This opens potential new revenue streams for operators who can remotely install 3^rd party software and paves the way for further innovation with the enhanced visibility of identifying what software can be remotely installed in the home.

Sign up to download ‘The future Telco – Connected Home 2021 Survey report’ here and receive a recording of the Forum USP/ TR-369 virtual workshop series here.