The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) today announced the Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrations planned for Fiber Connect 2024, July 28-31, in Nashville, Tenn. Seventeen companies will participate in eight PoC demonstrations that showcase how Connected Home innovations and services improve subscriber experience by leveraging the capacity, scale, latency, and/or security that only fiber broadband provides.
“These concepts will demonstrate the power of the fiber broadband ecosystem on the subscriber experience and fiber’s ability to support disruption, change market dynamics, and push the boundaries of possibilities,” said Evann Freeman, Fiber Broadband Association Board Member and Conference Committee Chair, and Vice President of Government & Community Relations at EPB of Chattanooga. “Our industry has some of the brightest minds at work to solve the connectivity challenges ahead as we look to connect every household in America, push past current technology limitations, and open up new frontiers with AI, Machine Learning, Quantum Networking, and many other exciting innovations.”
Fiber Connect 2024 PoCs will be collaborative projects involving at least one member company of FBA or Broadband Forum (BBF), and many will leverage one of two BBF Connected Home specifications: BBF.247 GPON ONU, which focuses on multi-vendor interoperability between OLTs (Optical Line Terminals) and ONUs (Optical Network Units), or BBF.369 User Services Platform (USP), which represents a fully realized managed services ecosystem for adding value to the connected home. PoCs can also demonstrate one or more services and applications outside of these specifications, if they do not apply, that support the conference theme of “Accelerating our Fiber Future” and could include innovative IoT, Artificial Intelligence, security, and other Smart Home or connectivity options.