Virtual Business Gateway - TR-328
- The first standard for distributed virtualized Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE)
- Meets today’s provider demand for standardized, carrier-class, interoperable solutions
- Technical and business platform for multi-vendor, multi-service growth
- Various deployment options shown below
New July 21st 2017: Download the TR-328 specification on the Technical Reports page
TR-328 Summary
- TR-328 specifies the virtual Business Gateway (vBG) system architecture. The vBG system virtualizes some of the functionality of a Business Gateway into a flexible hosting environment which may be located at the customer premises, in the operator's network, such as a CloudCO or using a combination of the two
- With the vBG system architecture, the functions provided traditionally by the BG are now distributed between a simplified on-site physical device called the pBG (physical Business Gateway) and a virtualized component - the virtual Business Gateway. The vBG hosting environment can benefit both from network equipment and recent network virtualization technology
- TR-328 describes the motivations to deploy the vBG System architecture, based on the use cases that it enables. In particular, it facilitates simplification of the customer located equipment, customer self-provision through a portal, rapid introduction of new services, decommissioning of unsuccessful ones, and upselling value-added services. All without the need to deploy specialized hardware devices to remote enterprise sites. Examples of value-added services include: enterprise class firewall, Wide Area Network optimization, etc.
What's the impact?
- Accelerates revenue with the ability of providers to market more value-added services
- TR-328 enables SD-WAN spearheaded by The Open Networking User Group (ONUG)
- With 50% of infrastructure spending slated to move to the cloud, standardized delivery from virtualized CloudCO will enable this significant shift in the industry
Why now?
- Service providers are seeking this solution as part of their SDN/NFV transformation. This is evidenced by providers in the Forum's own Service Provider Action Council, analyst surveys, and public statements and commentary
- Following trials and early adoptions the market is ready for standards based on experience gained from specific experiences
- Open source facilitates creating minimum viable products(MVP) but does not lend itself to the development of mass-market fully scalable products. This new work facilitates of consistent, interopable solutions need for mass deployment
- Open source is good and rapid way to start projects but has limitations in carrier-class quality and interoperability. It's standards that create very large markets and is the motivation for TR-328
Why the Broadband Forum?
- TR-328 connects to all of the Broadband 20/20 initiatives, especially TR-317 virtual Residential Gateway, Ultrafast, CloudCO and Performance-Aware IP services
- Missing a standardization framework, ISG has defined a top-level frameworks and NFVI infrastructure and how it's built and used in limited use cases (e.g. vCPE). This is the much-needed first standard to define both equipment specification and systems/functional, distributed architecture - defining the customer and CloudCo physical and virtual components."
- This new BBF specification complements work of other bodies working on SD-WAN and NFV
- This work draws on experience gained thus far by providers and integrators and provides the first standard that can be used as a trusted practical reference in RFPs