Deutsche Telekom highlights standards in broadband networks
Enabling faster time-to-market for new services, increased efficiency and lower operating costs, this network configuration and management with service delivery aims to address existing and emerging networking challenges. These sometimes include complex and slow interfacing between different management systems and vendors’ protocols, inflexibility as a result of proprietary management systems and M2M management which often lags behind features.
With Deutsche Telekom now looking to expand the architecture’s applicability, Demonstration Leader Mikael Abrahamsson said it must be standardized ‘as much as possible’ to ensure that automated networks can be built at scale. According to Abrahamsson, this will potentially allow operators to manage every aspect of their networks via a single protocol stack, enabling greater flexibility and efficiency, saving time and money.
“We are fully supportive of standardized APIs and models like NETCONF/YANG as they will allow operators to configure and manage many different things,” said Abrahamsson. “As we continue this work, we are working towards having standardized modules as much as possible and with open source development and cooperation between vendors and operators becoming more crucial, we believe Broadband Forum has an important role to play.”
Deutsche Telekom is now looking for more collaboration with other operators, Standards Defining Organizations (SDOs) and vendors.
The Q1 meeting, which took place on 18-21 March in Warsaw, Poland, was chosen as the platform for the debut of the NETCONF/YANG proof-of-concept due to some of its parallels with Broadband Forum’s ongoing work, including Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) and User Services Platform (USP).
OB-BAA enables standardized, automated and accelerated deployment of new cloud-based access infrastructure and services, facilitating co-existence, seamless migration and the agility to adapt to an increasingly wide variety of software defined access models. Meanwhile, USP addresses interoperability in the connected home, bringing a unified, common approach to securely deploy, manage, and control network-aware consumer electronics, in the home and enterprise including: Wi-Fi, Internet of Things (IoT), gateways and more.
Ongoing work around the connected home, 5G and Open Broadband also continued at the Q1 meeting. This included progression on the next version of USP, continuing collaboration with 3GPP on Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) and developments in the Broadband QED project.
“As operators look to ease and speed up new network deployments and quicken the time it takes to launch new services, this demonstration by Deutsche Telekom shows the potential of automated networks,” said Geoff Burke, Broadband Forum Chief Marketing Officer. “Deutsche Telekom’s approach to standardized YANG models confirms the work Broadband Forum is already doing in OB-BAA. With this in mind, Broadband Forum’s latest quarterly meeting was the ideal place to showcase this innovative work and it inspired much discussion among our members.”
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