Dawn of the Ultrafast Broadband Era

October 21, 2014, Amsterdam, Netherlands – Ultrafast broadband, that can enable the Internet of Everything, which includes 4K-video and cloud-based applications, is a growing presence as a proportion of total world fixed broadband subscriptions, which reached a record 700.19 million this week. But now the big challenge for the emerging ultrafast technologies such as G.fast is interoperability and today at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, the Broadband Forum is hosting the most advanced showcase of interoperable equipment and solutions ever staged, on its Interoperability Pavilion.

The Broadband Forum’s work and mission is focused on ensuring that broadband enables innovative high-speed applications and cloud based services to deploy at pace. However, as the network evolves and even higher speeds can be achieved with more innovative technologies, interoperability remains the key enabler.

This week’s Pavilion features 16 of the world’s top vendors, test houses and industry bodies and visitors will be able to see live examples of the latest G.fast technology, VDSL2 Vectoring, GPON and the Forum’s much-acclaimed TR-069 remote management protocol. The Pavilion is at the heart of the event at stand number E50 and among the organizations supporting the Forum has been the ITU-T, which is a partner for the Pavilion.

“Both standards and their implementation are a collaborative effort, and ITU-T is working closely with the Broadband Forum and others to help deliver both the protocols and the fast deployment of innovative technological developments such as G.fast.  We are pleased to support this Pavilion as one example of our close collaboration,” said the Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, Mr Malcolm Johnson. “Working together, ITU and the Broadband Forum can make sure the framework is in place to move to ultrafast rates.”

G.fast is one of the main areas of focus on the Pavilion. It answers many of the deployment questions around the demand for faster broadband – giving Gigabit speeds without the Outside Plant (OSP) costs. It is essentially a “fiber to the periphery” solution, bringing fiber closer to the customer; typically to within 20-200m depending on the deployment scenario. G.fast is set to be very important, particularly as service providers look to provide services such as IPTV at 500 to 1000 Mbps.

As G.fast moves forward, the Broadband Forum has also selected the world’s first testing laboratory to certify products designed for G.fast deployment. It has chosen the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), which has more than 25 years’ experience and major testing facilities.

“Interoperability of the G.fast and FTTdp solutions is essential to the rollout of these new technologies, and we’re working diligently with the Broadband Forum to quickly develop the test plans and certification program in step with the broadband industry’s first anticipated wave of G.fast products,” said Lincoln Lavoie, UNH-IOL Senior Engineer, Broadband Technologies. “Our goal is to begin initial testing of G.fast products during the first half of 2015 and deliver the first certifications during the second half of the year, so service providers can assure the certified CPE and DPU devices selected for their first FTTdp deployment will be interoperable.”

Robin Mersh, CEO, Broadband Forum added: “Operators have told us that interoperability will be key to the success of G.fast, so we are developing test plans based on their requirements, which UNH-IOL will certify based on those plans.”

“But the Pavilion is about much more than G.fast. We have all our approved test labs involved, with Telebyte’s G.Vector test lab coordinating a multi-vendor Fiber To The Node (FTTN) VDSL2 Vectoring demonstration, LAN showcasing our BBF.247 certification program and UNH-IOL showing the BBF.069 program and G.fast. In addition we have many other member companies showcasing compliance to Broadband Forum programs and test plans.”

In addition to the Forum and the ITU-T, companies and organizations taking part include Actelis, ADTRAN, ADB, Alcatel-Lucent, EXFO, Huawei, Ikanos Communications, JDSU, Juniper Networks, Keymile, Lantiq, LAN, MT2, Sagemcom, Sckipio, Telebyte and UNH-IOL.

The opening of the Pavilion comes just after the latest broadband data from Point Topic showed that there are now more than 700 million fixed broadband subscriptions in the world, an improvement on the 0.8% growth recorded in Q2 2013.

Oliver Johnson, CEO, Point Topic: “Our latest data sees another milestone passed with steady growth in most countries. As we start to figure out how to use what we have, and perhaps more importantly how to coordinate the services and extract the synergies, we’ll see more and more positive outcomes in the coming years. It’s very exciting.”

For more information about the Broadband Forum, please go to http://www.broadband-forum.org