Broadband Forum launches two Open Broadband projects and publishes the virtual Business Gateway standard

Helsinki, Finland – September 14, 2017: The first standard for distributed virtualized Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) has been published by the Broadband Forum as it continues to accelerate its work on Open Broadband, Cloud Central Office (CO) and SD-WAN.

The virtual Business Gateway (vBG) (TR-328) accelerates the delivery of new-generation standardized, carrier-class, interoperable business services such as enterprise class firewall and Wide Area Network optimization.

SD-WAN, spearheaded by the Open Networking User Group (ONUG), is enabled by the vBG, which connects to other Broadband Forum initiatives such as CloudCO and the Network Enhanced Residential Gateway. The completion of the landmark specification comes at the same time as the Forum begins work on two major software projects for Open Broadband and makes significant progress on its CloudCO project.

“As operators look to transform their networks with greater use of software and virtualization, demand for solutions, such as the vBG and CloudCO, with these associated reference implementations and API’s is growing – the market is now ready for standards-based software deliverables for Open Broadband,” said Robin Mersh, CEO of Broadband Forum.

The vBG system enables greater efficiency in service provider networks by virtualizing some of the functionality of a Business Gateway into a flexible hosting environment, which may be located at the customer premises, in the operator’s network, such as a CloudCO, or using a combination of the two.

This simplifies customer-located equipment and customer self-provision through a portal, rapid introduction of new services, decommissioning of unsuccessful ones and up-selling value-added services. All of this can be done without the need to deploy specialized hardware devices to remote enterprise sites.

The CloudCO User Managed Objects Framework project creates a cloud-based user interface framework, and a user managed oriented objects template that can be used by all providers. This aims to satisfy customer requirements such as SD-WAN, where the customer wants to have WAN resource telemetry in the user browsers, portals, and for use by their applications. This project will leverage and extend the Forum’s work on the vBG and will use standardized API’s such as DMTF Redfish®

The second key project is Broadband Access Abstraction Open Source which addresses the requirements, architecture, design, and software required to support the virtualization of access device functionality and enabling an open and interoperable unified management interface for access equipment from different vendors. This project will be managed under the Forum’s agile Open Broadband software initiative, allowing for member and non-member participation to create a fast feedback loop between the specifications and the source code reference implementation that supports them.

The two new software projects are the first open source initiatives undertaken by the Forum and are spearheaded by groups of key operators and their manufacturer partners.

The vBG was published and the Open Broadband projects were launched during the Broadband Forum’s Q3 meeting, sponsored by Nokia, which took place in Helsinki Finland.

For more information about the Broadband Forum and its vBG specifications, please visit: https://www.broadband-forum.org/standards-and-software/major-projects/virtual-business-gateway