Lincoln Lavoie, Senior Engineer for the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab, provides an overview of the Broadband Forum’s October 27th, 2018 BASe event.   The event covered all types of next generation access, whether wired (e.g. NGPON2) or wireless (e.g. 5G), as well as access within the home.

Lavoie, who is also Technical Committee Chair of the Broadband Forum, touches upon a couple of the BBF’s new in-home networking standards, including the Users Service Platform (USP) and OB-MAP (Open Broadband Multi-Access Point). USP could be considered the evolution of TR-069 as it allows multi-tenant management and control of in-home devices and new use-cases to account for the proliferation of IoT gadgets and sensors. Lavoie describes USP as a more secure and lighter implementation while leveraging the experience and know-how of TR-069.

The intent of the OB-MAP effort is to ensure scalable management approach to Wi-Fi CERTIFIED EasyMesh™ products. This flows from the recently announced partnership between the Broadband Forum and the Prpl Foundation to develop an open source reference to speed the development of carrier-grade Wi-Fi.

Lavoie talks about the Broadband Forum’s role in bridging open source and standards and the positive feedback loop between open source and standards. He suggests that early implementation via open source provides valuable feedback as to what features make sense from a market perspective.

Abstracting the functionality from the hardware is providing flexibility of deployment. Lavoie indicates that this has changed the testing they do in the lab and allow them to get involved and provide feedback earlier in the testing process.