MATTHEW PEACH BROADBAND FORUM THE BROAD VIEW of high-speed connectivity
T he Broadband Forum’s experience of broadband is sourced from its membership of more than 150 manufacturers and service provider companies and, over the past 24 years, the organisation has published over 200 globally adopted standards. Robin Mersh joined the Broadband Forum as Chief Operating Officer in July 2006, and was promoted to CEO in July 2010. He has worked in the telecommunications industry for over 18 years, starting at Cable & Wireless before moving on to BT. The Forum’s new “Broadband 20/20” vision is about unlocking the potential for new markets and profitable revenue growth by leveraging new technologies in the home, intelligent small business and multi-user infrastructure of the broadband network, says Mersh. He adds, “The Forum is focused on real world deployment rather than just research and development. There is certainly R&D here but it’s much more focused on deployment. When we started the group was much more about advocacy on DSL (protocol), initially to do with controlling costs and solving the problems of deployment and having more open interfaces. RAISING STANDARDS “But it grew into addressing a lot more technical issues, such as a standard architecture, which led us to be able to have conforming products and systems and hence to interoperability including such devices as DSLAMs and CPE. It’s always the case with new technologies that the marketing becomes a more significant issue for the sector.” Considering broadband and optical fibre, Mersh believes that relationship is changing due to the development of new protocols that are reinvigorating copper networks. “Previously, I would have said that broadband and optical fibre were strongly linked but that situation has changed in the past couple of years. Video is the biggest driver but that won’t necessarily be the case for ever. “The other major factor impacting broadband is the development of new ultrafast last mile solutions; traditionally one might have expected fibre to be necessary for the last mile but is no longer necessarily the case with the development of technologies such as Gfast, which is really designed to be a fibre network extender. The idea for anybody deploying Gfast is to make ultrafast last mile deployment more affordable.
Delivering better broadband, closer to the customer is a delicate balance of medium, whether optical or copper, and transport protocols. Matthew Peach interviews Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum.
“At the same time, we have also seen FTTx solutions being developed a lot quicker; some operators are talking about FTTc being the optimal way to deploy last mille broadband; in this case fibre will certainly the critical medium. Another hot topic at the moment is the implications of the 5G standard. The need for more bandwidth is pushing this and it is stimulating the whole next generation PON discussion.” Asked to consider gaps in the network developer’s toolbox, Mersh thinks and replies, “there still isn’t yet a complete end-to-end fibre architecture that is completely interoperable. And there is also pressure from consumers and regulators for the operators to move towards a more standardised architectural model.” FTTH “One of the major issues around FTTH is making the connection over the last few metres at the highest speed while still remaining economical,” says Mersh. “This section of the network is usually also the problem area for getting access to enable deployment.” “Considering Gfast, if there is already a copper network in a given area then Gfast could be an effective alternative to last-mile fibre; ultimately because there’s less disruption at the last few meters, it’s more cost-effective without reduced performance.” Gfast is being deployed enthusiastically by nbn, Australia’s National Broadband Network, and in some areas by BT in the UK, which has stated that it will reach 12 million homes by 2020. The Broadband Forum is working work on the software side of Gfast, to develop an open access management platform. NEW DEVELOPMENTS Just ahead of Broadband World Forum 2017 the Broadband Forum announced that it was launching two Open Broadband projects and it published its “virtual Business Gateway standard”. The first standard for distributed virtualised Customer Premises Equipment
Broadband Forum CEO, Robin Mersh
(vCPE) was published by the Broadband Forum as it continues to accelerate its work on Open Broadband, Cloud Central Office (CO) and SD-WAN. The virtual Business Gateway (vBG) (TR- 328) accelerates the delivery of new- generation standardised, carrier-class, interoperable business services such as enterprise class firewall and Wide Area Network optimisation. “As operators look to transform their networks with greater use of software and virtualisation, demand for solutions, such as the vBG and CloudCO, with these associated reference implementations and API’s is growing – the market is now ready for standards-based software deliverables for Open Broadband,” says Mersh. The vBG system enables greater efficiency in service provider networks by virtualising 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. The second key project is Broadband Access Abstraction Open Source, which addresses the requirements, architecture, design, and software required to support the virtualisation of access device functionality and enabling an open and interoperable unified management interface for access equipment from different vendors.
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| ISSUE 11 | Q4 2017
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