Next steps in Cloud CO and USP projects revealed as the Forum prepares to help operators develop cloud services

October 27, 2016: The Broadband Forum today announced it is making significant progress on projects leveraging new technology and developmental approaches as it looks to deliver on the actions decided at its Special Meeting in Atlanta earlier this year.

There, the Forum agreed to embrace the best of both open source and standards development and instigate new methods for rapid delivery of innovative software and standards. Since then, a number of important initiatives have progressed, enabling significant advances:

• The Cloud Central Office (CO) project, which delivers a services-led, software-defined Broadband platform combining SDN, NFV and cloud aspects, has kicked into high gear with many leading operators and manufacturers pushing this forward.
• The User Services Platform (USP) – the natural evolution of the popular TR-069 protocol into the world of the Internet of Things (IoT) and consumer electronics – has hit a significant milestone, with its first ‘hackfest’ taking place, where prototype implementations showed the first proof-of-concept of the protocol. Demonstrations included the control of Z-wave lights through a proxy gateway, automation using a sensor/camera combination, control from both cloud and local controllers, and interoperable on basic request/responses between three different implementations.
• Preparation for a significant cooperation with 3GPP that will lead to the advance of 5G on a unified network.

Broadband Forum chairman Kevin Foster, of BT, said: “There is no question about whether operators want to embrace agility and programmability in their networks; the only question is how they do it in order to enable faster time-to-market, new value-added services and migration from existing networks without disruption to their customers.”

The Forum is also enabling the operator community to come together and drive the requirements that will accelerate the migration from static to virtualized networks, allowing for new relationships, new business models and new services. The Forum welcomes participation across the industry in its Service Provider Action Council, which is a unique resource to forge operator consensus around the common issues facing the industry and the technologies that can help address them.

The Forum believes that the development and adoption of the cloud concept will enable a broadband platform that can deliver new value to the industry and create a global market for applications and services.