FEATURE: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
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Robin Mersh, CEO of
the Broadband Forum,
discusses one aspect of
Digital Transformation
which involves telcos
automating and updating
their networks. He
discusses how the
company is driving
standardisation of NFV
and SDN technologies
to enable the Digital
Transformation of telco
networks at a large scale.
I
n today’s central office architectures,
access and edge network segments
are reliant upon application-specific,
purpose-built devices. This architecture has
been the foundation upon which more than
1 billion broadband installations have been
deployed globally.
Over time, ecosystems formed around
this architecture, cultivated by formal
interoperability programmes and stimulated a
diverse equipment market whose parts could
work together to operate at scale. However,
with the emergence of 5G, the Internet of
Things (IoT) and the connected home, this
architecture is already being sorely tested,
both in terms of its ability to efficiently
continue to scale and also in its lack of agility
in rapidly introducing new services.
The emergence of new innovative
technologies such as cloud, Network
Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software
Defined Network (SDN)-based automation
of ultra-fast access technologies and open
source has triggered the demand for new,
cloud-based architectures and has allowed
telcos to re-examine their existing networks.
These technologies will be at the heart of the
revitalisation of the broadband ecosystem,
opening the door to new revenue-generating
opportunities for service providers. With this
in mind, it’s only natural that migration to
cloud-based access infrastructures is at the
top of every operator’s agenda – but how
can they achieve this and coexistence with
already installed equipment so that previous
investment is not lost? Proposing a solution
to this challenge is Broadband Forum’s Open
Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction
(OB-BAA) project which has just published its
second code release.
Open and agile
If operators’ access networks are to evolve
towards an SDN/NFV-based network
architecture, they must be built on the
notion of SDN-controlled lifecycle services
and functions that can be easily scaled up
or down, depending on the requirements
of each networking customer. Open source
models are also a critical component and will
introduce a more agile way of networking,
which will significantly change how solutions
are developed and deployed. Fundamentally,
open source principles encourage open
APIs that are programmable and standard,
using open data that separates data
and application logic. Furthermore, they
encourage open specifications that can be
Digital
Transformation by
Enabling
migrating to cloud-based networks
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