BROADBAND FORUM
[Fibre] is a very hot topic for us. In the new year, we will be launching the first certified products for 10G PON, including XGS- PON and NG-PON2.
It is worth noting however that our work differs from the work on high-level management being done by other organisations, because we are working on element management, which is much lower down in the network. When we talk about commonality, it is about getting away from proprietary element management, and that’s been very successful. This work could lead not just to more common management, but also much more successful interoperability and then potentially a much stronger migration path, opening broadband networks to more programmability, including potentially, white box solutions. This is a very interesting area for us because even though we talk about it in terms of software and management, its knock-on effect is much bigger.
of 10G PON at the beginning of 2020. We’ve been doing a lot of activity around that space and we don’t want to limit it to 10G because there’s been a lot of conversations especially driven by 5G around 25G, 40G and 100G, and we’ll be doing a lot of work around that in the coming months as well. The Virtual Broadband Network Gateway is also something that’s getting a lot of focus and momentum. PD: Does Broadband Forum look at issues around hybrid broadband network management? RM: Yes, this is something we’ve been focused on for quite a long time, to get a more homogenous view of network management for broadband. The more similarly you manage them, the easier it is, as you have to worry about co-existence and certainly migration. Some of our early work was about creating some abstraction but that has progressed ever since. We have a YANG modelling project that has been going on for some time and the idea there is to have as much similarity as possible between the access technologies, which means you can then abstract the management to a higher layer. The YANG itself was delivered as a regular specification and we subsequently took it into an open source project with the automation piece being a particularly interesting feature.
around Wi-Fi and mesh Wi-Fi, and its measurability in both quality and the application of mesh. Looking at 5G, that is going to accelerate toward mass deployment in this coming year so we’ve been doing a lot of foundation work on that with 3GPP and others to establish how convergence happens with the existing network infrastructure and what the services will look like in the converged world of the future. A lot of the work we’ve done to date will come to fruition in the next six-to-nine months as those standards get solidified and we actually see real 5G deployments hitting the market, rather than the trials and technology tweaks we’ve seen up to now. With our work on Cloud and CloudCO, we made a couple of interesting announcements at BBWF. We’ve been doing a lot of work with Open Networking Foundation on establishing the role that our Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction projects will be playing in the future, which can be best described as a leading path for carriers seeking to implement SDN and virtualisation overall in brownfield deployments. That’s a major area of focus and the demonstrations at BBWF were extremely popular so there’s a lot of momentum in that area. Additionally, there’s the certification
Robin Mersh, CEO Broadband Forum
Geoff Burke, Chief Marketing Officer Broadband Forum
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