As it continues its stated mission of bringing the full promise of broadband to fruition, the Broadband Forum has unveiled three projects to deliver an improved user experience, including reduced latency, and a wider choice of in-home applications to broadband consumers.
The Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband initiative is designed to bring open source and open standards together, and the three projects will endeavour to provide open source software blueprints for application providers and broadband service providers (BSPs) to follow, delivering a foundation for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for network automation, additional tools for network latency and performance measurements, and on-demand connectivity for different applications.
The projects will deliver open-source reference implementations acting act as a starting point for application developers to base their designs on. In turn, those applications are available on platforms for BSPs to select and offer to their customers, overall, shortening the path between the development of the specification to the first deployment of the technologies into the network.
Specifically, the new Open Broadband-CloudCO-Application Software Development Kit (OB-CAS), Open Broadband – Simple Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (OB-Stamp), and Open Broadband – Subscriber Session Steering (OB-Steer) projects are looking to bring together software developers and standards experts from the forum.
OB-CAS aims to simplify network monitoring and maintenance for BSPs, while also offering a wider selection of applications from various software suppliers. Alongside this, network operations will be simplified and automated through existing Broadband Forum cloud standards that use AI and ML to improve the end-user experience.
OB-Stampwill look to build an “easy-to-deploy” component that simplifies network performance measurement between customer premises equipment and IP edge. The project will allow BSPs to proactively monitor their subscribers’ home networks to measure latency and ultimately avoid network failures. Four vendors have already signed up to join the efforts to reduce the cost and time associated with deploying infrastructure for measuring network latency.
Building on Broadband Forum’s upcoming technical report WT-474, OB-Steer will create a reference implementation of the Subscriber Session Steering architecture to deliver on-demand connectivity and simplify network management. Interoperability of Subscriber Session Steering is regarded as being of high importance as it will be implemented in the access network equipment and edge equipment from various vendors.
Commenting on the developments, Broadband Forum technical chair Lincoln Lavoie said: “These new projects will play a key role in improving network performance measurement and monitoring and the end-user experience. Open source software is a crucial component in providing the blueprint for BSPs to follow and we invite interested companies to get involved.”
Broadband Forum CEO Craig Thomas added: “The development of open source software and open broadband standards are invaluable to the industry, laying the foundations for faster innovation through global collaboration. The Broadband Forum places the end-user experience at the forefront of all of our projects and is playing a crucial role in overcoming network issues.”
The new projects come on the heels of the Broadband Forum embarking in late 2024 on a project to support fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) service providers in their pursuit of more energy-efficient networks that can unlock significant power savings as providers look to meet rising demand for high-speed connectivity.