By Ken Pyle, Marketing Director at Broadband Forum
As the industry, in its early stages, continues its transition from connectivity-driven offerings towards service-led broadband, it is crucial to acknowledge the significance of live demonstrations, plugfests, and certification programs of the latest enablers for that much-anticipated evolution. These initiatives serve as vital building blocks in establishing the initial connection points and fostering collaboration among key industry players, diverse architectures, and users. Together, they play an essential role in nurturing an interoperable and open broadband environment that will drive innovation and enhance user experiences.
The Broadband Forum and its members are at the forefront when it comes to transforming broadband into a services-led powerhouse for operators. At Network X on October 8-10, we will showcase and explore network innovations that are empowering operators on their journey toward a more dynamic and service-driven broadband ecosystem.
The services-led opportunities
The global broadband industry is at a pivotal stage in its timeline. While high-speed broadband is still a key selling point for companies, it is well-trodden path. The broadband market has become increasingly more competitive, in turn, pushing the price of broadband down. The industry must therefore look elsewhere for monetary gain.
The vast broadband ecosystem encompassing diverse devices, technologies, and services, as well as end-users, such as the video streamer, the gamer, the smart home device user, and the homeworker, all have new and varying requirements.
While this task may seem daunting with the wide range of users and devices to appease, it is presenting an ideal opportunity for network operators to increase ARPU and generate new revenue streams by offering value-add services on top of their broadband offerings.
But for this to happen, broadband networks need to become more dynamic and offer service-aware and application-appropriate Quality of Experience (QoE) depending on the service or application in use.
Next stop: Network X
The 2024 Broadband Forum Innovation Demonstrations
As a Standards Development Organisation (SDO), the Broadband Forum has a leading role to play in creating the foundations for the shift to services-led broadband. Open standards and software are paramount in creating new insights, innovations and interoperable, holistic solutions that allow service providers to offer more personalized packages to their subscribers.
During the past year, our membership has progressed a breadth of open standards and software projects that is enabling network innovation, fitting for the industry’s migration to services-focus. This is underscored by the expansion beyond the CloudCO-centric demos shown at last year’s Network X to this year’s event. Now dubbed the ‘Broadband Forum Innovation Demonstrations’, the Broadband Forum will showcase six – with two first-time – use cases, enabled by our standards.
These network innovations are driving and ensuring QoE, improving network efficiency and performance, and accelerating time-to-market of new services for service providers.
New and first-time use cases include ‘OB-CAS: Alarm Correlation App’, and ‘Wireless-Wireline Convergence with 5G-RG and Integrated AGF/UPF’. The former will demonstrate the automated deployment of best practices and applications for greater troubleshooting of equipment in the access network, enabled by Broadband Forum’s open broadband project, OB-CAS. The latter will demonstrate a 5G Fixed Access Residential Gateway, connecting to, and controlled by, a 5G core. This is based on our 5G work that is enabling convergence with the 3GPP architecture.
Other demonstrations include use cases for network equipment interoperability, smart network traffic steering, fixed access network sharing, and smart home application management.
By providing a real-life proof-of-success, these demonstrations do not only provide the first connection point to nurture an interoperable ecosystem, but the confidence the industry needs to adopt Broadband Forum’s standards.
Be part of a significant milestone in our journey!
Learning from Lincoln Lavoie at UNH-IOL
It has been a pleasure to document the Broadband Forum’s demonstrations over the last few years, but this year will be marked down as nothing short of transformative. The journey itself is the true reward. We have witnessed how our members' ideas evolve into these dynamic demonstrations and have all learned invaluable lessons along the way. Together we have uncovered insights that can improve and enhance the Broadband Forum standards and open broadband software.
The demos can be seen at the Broadband Forum Member Pavilion – Stand C46 at Network X on October 8-10 in Paris. Participants include 5x9 Networks, Adtran, Altice Labs, Axyom Core, BISDN, Condor Technologies, Deutsche Telekom, Incognito Software Systems, University of New Hampshire IOL (UNH-IOL), Net Reply, Netsia, Nokia, OutSys, and Zyxel.
While the demonstrations will take place on the show floor at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, we are still committed to showcasing the global influence and impact of our standards and software defined networking. Behind the scenes, components of the demonstrations will be hosted in the private and public clouds of the UNH-IOL and Deutsche Telekom labs, located in New Hampshire, USA, and Germany, respectively.
Broadband Forum members will also come together at the Pavilion for BASe workshops to explore the technologies, innovations, and broadband standards that are enabling operators to seamlessly manage the connected home, differentiate their services, and deliver greater value beyond providing basic connectivity, unlocking new revenue.
