Broadband Forum unveils latest CloudCO developments

Fremont, California: Operators can save time and effort by collaborating to create more automation in the deployment of services and closed loop control as Broadband Forumdemonstrates the evolution of its Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) project at this year’s Broadband World Forum. Bringing together nine leading vendors and renowned international interoperability labs, the virtual video demonstration will showcase how greater network and service agility is within reach.

Aligning remote engineers, equipment and labs from three continents into a single, integrated demonstration of the flagship architecture CloudCO, it highlights the work on Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) which leverages a combination of SDN automation and virtualization and open source innovation. For the first time, OB-BAA will be partnered with User Services Platform (USP) functionality for remote Wi-Fi Closed Loop automation.

Combining open source initiatives and supported by four of the world’s leading service providers (BT, Swisscom, TIM, Vodafone), the demonstration includes speakers and engineers from Altice Labs, Altran, Broadcom, CommScope, DZS, EANTC, Nokia and University of New Hampshire – InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). It spotlights network transformation and innovation, and leverages a combination of rigorous standards specifications, quality Open Source software components and a collaboration lab test environment.

“From the Central Office to end-user equipment, operators demand greater service creation agility and attention has shifted from migrating selected functionality that is locked in existing network elements towards the cloud as virtualized network functions,” said Tim Carey, OB-BAA Project Lead at Broadband Forum. “This event will demonstrate the importance of combining open source technologies and standards to ensure the seamless migration to automated networks from siloed management and control systems.”

The demonstration is built from the ground-up with components from the vendor community and open source components from ONAP, and Broadband Forum’s OB-USP-Agent and OB-BAA projects. The demonstration also takes advantage of major new enhancements to Broadband Forum’s OB-BAA open source project including demonstrating “white box” and virtual Optical Line Terminal (vOLT) approaches, virtual ONU Management and Control Interface (vOMCI), and cross-domain management, control and orchestration for the Access, Edge and Customer Premises network segments.

CloudCO is a recasting of the Central Office hosting infrastructure that utilizes SDN, NFV and Cloud technologies to support network functions. The CloudCO architecture allows operators to move to deployments which leverage on disaggregation and virtualization concepts. The demonstration will also showcase multi-vendor OLT and ONT interworking for automated service creation, multi-vendor remote subscriber Wi-Fi Monitoring and service management and automated service relocation across a multiple vendor network.

“The demonstration speaks to solution developers, network operators and service providers and showcases network and services agility, automation and orchestration by SDN, NFV and cloud technologies,” said Mauro Tilocca, Chairman of Service Provider Action Council at Broadband Forum. “This is a natural ramp up of the showcasing in 2018 and 2019 at Broadband World Forum. Today it involves more network domains, more operations and service dynamics and a wider group of solution manufacturers unified by a vision of interoperable and streamlined service deployments.”