What role does open source have to play in the Connected Home alongside standards?

What role does open source have to play in the Connected Home alongside standards?

By Lincoln Lavoie, Technical Chair, Broadband Forum

Today we are at a midpoint between the conception of the ‘Connected Home’ and a time when smart devices have become considered essential to everyday life, in the same way a smartphone has. If you don’t believe me, you can ask my wife, who is very quick to notice when one of my home automation tasks fails, even though she could have turned on the lights herself when she got home. The journey toward smart home device ubiquity will be taking leaps forward in innovation, taken from solid platforms of standardization, well defined APIs, interfaces, and integrations between different platforms. The successful combination of sharing and collaboration, in line with open source principles with the efficiency and interoperability provided by the development of these standards will be the engine that accelerates progress toward our connected future.

Setting the standard

Standards have driven forward great technological advances in history. Agreeing to adhere to a common set of rules and design principles was vital to everything from the proliferation of the railway to the growth of Association Football becoming the world’s most popular sport. In computing, standards are everywhere – even if most people do not realize it. Everything from the language used to create websites, to the most used format for playing audio files, have been developed within standards.

The Broadband Forum, in its original guise, was set up to establish new standards around DSL products and the first published specification, TR-001 was released nearly a quarter of a century ago. As technology advanced, new standards were created and older ones updated and refined to remain relevant. The landmark TR-069 standard, for example, was first published in 2004 to provide service providers with a protocol to remotely support Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) and was amended five times. Today, this standard has evolved into the User Services Platform (USP) (TR-369) as the industry tries to manage the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) services and connected devices going online.

As the technology industry continued to develop rapidly, the concept of creating software through open collaboration emerged in the late 90’s to harness a wide range of resources and speed up development time. It has become associated with visionary and innovative ways of accelerating progress and has resulted in a range of projects from operating systems to browsers and e-commerce platforms.

Driving the connected future

Fast-forward to today and it is clear that the unification of open source with open standards will be essential to the efficient and cost-effective delivering of the broadband access technologies and services of the future. By marrying the two together the flexibility, innovation, and speed of open source can be combined with the discipline, efficiencies, and global scale made possible by open standards.

The impact of this powerful combination will be felt most keenly in the home as it drives forward innovation and accelerates the journey toward the mass adoption of connected ‘smart’ devices. A clear example of the advantages that the unification brings can be found in Broadband Forum’s USP specifications. As a truly standardized, interoperable platform that increases the value of the end-user’s network connection with new IoT, security, and services, USP enables faster, more efficient, and reliable control, monitoring, and management of connected devices within a home or business.

Alongside this, Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband – User Services Platform Agent (OB-USP-A) project provided vendors with a code base that they can either integrate into their devices or use as a reference implementation as they utilize USP. By providing a “headstart” in development and integration of the USP specification, this open source implementation facilitates USP deployment, resulting in faster time-to-market for USP-based solutions and innovation. Manufacturers and developers can leverage the existing agent and the standardized data models to not only enable USP within their project, but also directly integrate their product with an USP controller. This will shorten the innovation cycle, as the teams can build and work directly with existing systems or integrate with their customer’s deployments, such as allowing an existing operator’s customer dashboard to control their device.

Furthermore, the just-launched USP Agent Certification program allows companies to cost-effectively test any broadband or consumer connected device against the Conformance Test Plan for User Services Platform Agents (TP-469) standard. This will greatly accelerate interoperability by streamlining companies’ ability to perform repeatable, automated testing on their own while preserving the integrity of the results and overall value of certified products by testing against rigorous standards.

As consumer demand for smart home services continues to rise, the assurance and confidence the USP standard provides, combined with the agility and accelerated development time of open source, OB-USP-A opens the possibilities of the Connected Home to the entire broadband industry.