Broadband Forum showcases Deutsche Telekom’s vision for NETCONF/YANG standardization

Warsaw, Poland, 21 March 2019: The importance of standardization within future broadband networks has been highlighted by Deutsche Telekom at Broadband Forum’s Q1 Meeting as it demonstrated a NETCONF/YANG proof-of-concept for network management built on standardized APIs and data models.

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. 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.

Broadband Forum’s Q1 meeting, which took place on 18-21 March in Warsaw, Poland, was chosen as the platform for the debut of the 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.

“We were delighted to host this Deutsche Telekom demonstration at our Q1 meeting and as expected, many of our members were interested in these proposals due to its close relationship to projects like OB-BAA and USP. The more you can standardize data models and protocols, the easier it will be for operators to address the expanding market they are working in – both in terms of rising subscriber numbers and the proliferation of devices in an IoT era. Of course, that is what OB-BAA and USP are also trying to do and Deutsche Telekom’s initiative aligns with this approach”

Ongoing work around the connected home, 5G and Open Broadband also continued at Broadband Forum’s 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. 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.”

Elsewhere at the meeting, a number of industry stalwarts were also recognized for their contributions to the broadband industry at its annual awards. Tim Carey, of Nokia, received a Distinguished Fellow Award in recognition of his significant, long-standing contributions to the worldwide development and advancement of broadband. Among his most recent work is Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA), which has just published its second code release.

Two Circle of Excellence Awards were presented, with the first going to Marco Spini, of Huawei Technologies, for technical excellence, outstanding contributions to the FMC work and fruitful cooperation with 3GPP. The second was given to Ning Zong, of Huawei Technologies, recognizing technical excellence and outstanding contributions and Project Stream leadership to Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) and Open Broadband which drove forward the architectural framework and Open Broadband Labs.