The Broadband Forum’s important work will help the broadband ecosystem to flourish

The Broadband Forum’s important work will help the broadband ecosystem continue to flourish

By Ken Ko, Managing Director at Broadband Forum

If anything good can be said about 2020, perhaps it is that it proved to be a catalyst of sorts, bringing about a renewed appreciation for broadband services that deliver performance and reliability. As we found ourselves dealing with the reality of remote work and home schooling as well as increased dependence on connectivity for entertainment and social interaction, providers responded to unprecedented traffic growth by not just maintaining but improving broadband performance over the last year.[1]

The same can be said of the Broadband Forum, as we adjusted to working 100% virtually in response to the global pandemic. In 2020, the BBF demonstrated a high level of activity despite the challenges of the new normal. We published 25 technical reports plus 14 application notes, test plans, and market updates, as well as attracting 24 new members. The Broadband Forum also successfully held five virtual BASe events and more than 20 other events from the educational webinar series. These activities have helped to solidify the industry wide support we have cultivated over the past year.

Broadband providers have been tasked with the crucial work of keeping us connected as we move forward through and beyond the pandemic. To that end, they need to provide significantly more than a utility service, managing devices, services, and performance across not only the access link but within increasingly complex home and business networks. Along the way, they also need to support self-care tools for service management and installation, as well as carrier grade Quality of Experience across the full network path. And of course, they need to provide all this while supporting ever increasing network traffic, adding resources, and deploying services efficiently and with rapid time-to-market.

The Broadband Forum has been a significant contributor to several trends that help providers address the above challenges. The set of access options at the physical layer has steadily grown, with multiple technologies deployed over fiber, copper, coax, and wireless. Hybrid networks are the norm, with fiber penetrating deeper into the network each year. Wireline/wireless convergence enables a common set of resources for providers as well as a seamless experience for users. And of course, network transformation to cloud-based and disaggregated networks like CloudCO is enabling the kind of dynamic responsiveness that helped providers meet the challenges of last year’s dramatic step change in user requirements.

The above network trends have been matched by improvements in service, device, and performance management. User Services Platform represents a generational advance in capability beyond CWMP, which itself has enjoyed near-ubiquitous deployment over the years as the protocol of choice for device management. USP provides the features necessary to manage the increasingly complex Connected Home environment, including a flexible architecture, protocol, and data models. This capability dovetails nicely with the increasingly sophisticated performance metrics and analysis techniques provided by IP-Layer Capacity Metrics, Quality Experience Delivered, and other projects.

The Broadband Forum has a long history of supporting the industry with Open Standards that facilitate ease of deployment, interoperability, vendor neutrality, and time to market. In addition, our testing and certification programs and numerous plugfests promote interworking as well as facilitating carrier-grade performance that now extends into the Connected Home. On the marketing and education side, our BASe events and webinars have increased exponentially in recent years, both in number and attendance. Finally, BBF’s Open Broadband projects are generating open-source reference implementations to help jump-start use of the technologies and protocols we’ve specified.

On a personal note, I’m delighted to help lead the Broadband Forum after many years working with the organization as a member representative. I appreciate both the difficulty and the sense of accomplishment that comes from forging consensus in this environment, where progress is dependent not only on technical expertise, but also on building constructive working relationships with your competitors. I have tremendous respect for the people who progress the work here, which has made it a real pleasure to come back.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note how much easier this job is because of the Forum’s highly professional, committed, and talented staff. BBF has people on both sides of the Atlantic who keep the ship running smoothly through face-to-face and virtual meetings, online collaboration, BASe events, and many, many projects. I’ve also been privileged to get to know Craig Thomas over the past few months as we work together closely in our respective roles. Craig leads strategic marketing and business development, I handle the technical work and day-to-day operations, and we join our complementary experiences and skill sets together to develop and execute strategy for the Forum. Together with this team and with these members, I look forward to taking on future challenges and watching the Broadband Forum, and the industry it supports, continue to flourish.

[1] https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/tracking-covid-19-impact-global-internet-performance/#/Global, https://www.speedtest.net/global-index