Craig Thomas, CEO of Broadband Forum
The milestones along Broadband Forum’s journey have mirrored the incredible progress that has taken broadband from a dial-up alternative to multi-gigabit connectivity. Our ecosystem-wide deployable standards have shaped how broadband services were, are and will be delivered. The billions of connected devices that have been enabled by TR-069 and the subsequent evolution to TR-369 (USP) for the entire connected user and home experience is just one example of the wide impact of our, and our contributors’, work.
At this week’s Fall Meeting in San Diego, we are celebrating another milestone as our organization recognizes 30 years of making broadband a reality. In that time, our output has evolved from defining specifications for a copper-based physical layer at broadband’s beginnings to today’s evolved all-fiber and converged access.
As our scope has widened with the growing needs of our industry, we have driven end-to-end access and transport’s virtual and physical development with nodal and network wide cloud management standards. The work is not over, though - there will soon be 1.5 billion broadband subscribers worldwide, of which many have evolving and higher expectations of their service.
Open, transparent, collaborative
Throughout the years, a key principle to our success has been collaboration. Our Work Areas have consistently brought some of the most dedicated and talented professionals in broadband to help make deployments and innovation in the industry easier. Partnerships with other organisations have driven, aligned, and coordinated industry progress across the telecommunications landscape.
Responding to an industry increasingly propelled by open-source innovation, transparency and ensuring a flow of information has been central to accelerate broadband innovation and progress. Under the banner of Open Broadband, open-source projects have developed quickly, supporting the specifications that Broadband Forum has always produced.
From operators to vendors, these efforts have helped the businesses that want to deliver better broadband that is truly interoperable across technologies and vendors. By reducing R&D, testing, and service deployment for network operators, wholesalers, and broadband service providers, our mission has helped make the broadband connection efficient, manageable, and with reduced investment cost for vendors. Broadband has become a lot easier to deliver, but that is only part of an ever-evolving journey.
Over its history, Broadband Forum has kept its finger on the pulse of broadband, evolving and even reinventing itself to make sure the requirements of both customers and those delivering networks are met. These new verticals, as well as more aware application-relevant demands of consumers, will bring new demands and functionality to the broadband service provision. There are multiple ways Broadband Forum and its Work groups are helping this journey.
From AI to sustainable networks
The industry is moving to an era of multi-service broadband and not just for consumers but for other verticals including business/enterprise, smart cities, public services, IoT and even mobile xHaul.
The broadband industry is continually developing the best approach to utilizing AI/ML to deliver network intelligence, manageability and agility to the physical network. Generative AI will also automate relevant services and user experience across all parts of the home and cloud to the end-user application on the device. AI can also help the increasing demands for service assurance and security, ensuring continued investment for security to the subscriber but also to the integrity of the operators’ network.
The same goes for secure and sustainable, energy efficient broadband which will increasingly be a prerequisite to any future network investment, both within the subscriber premises and across the network. Convergence of networks also has a major role in reducing the operators carbon footprint.
Undoubtedly, containerization of services will create its own momentum that drives new services and monetization, as well as differentiation, to the managed user services. We’re confident that USP will become the “de facto” operator solution to make this a reality.
Ultimately Quality of Experience (QoE) will need to be delivered end-to-end from the cloud all the way across the network and the Wi-Fi to the device. QoE that leverages the managed home, the access network, the aggregation and middle mile and within the data center. SDN/NFV, QED, Session steering, L4S, AI/ML, Convergence and TR-181 and USP with data modelling all have a role to play here to make this a coherent approach to QoE.
Moving on from the “speed sale”
We’re at an exciting period of the broadband industry, where ultra-fast connectivity remains a need, but how operators pivot from the “speed sale” to meet the services-led demands of the subscriber, become an equally if not more important challenge. And where challenges lie in broadband, so too do opportunities. Opportunities to differentiate services and continuously deliver even better experiences to customers.
We encourage you as industry stakeholders to continue to support standards development, adopt interoperable solutions and, invest and contribute to our ongoing work.
Find out more the benefits of joining Broadband Forum here or contact Rhonda Heier at [email protected] to hear how you can get involved in our work.
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