The Broadband Forum and SDN/NFV Industry Alliance announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to jointly establish the Open Broadband Laboratory Asia (OBLA) and to promote network transformation and cloud evolution initiatives.
The new partnership, signed during the recent China SDN/NFV Conference in Beijing, also introduces the forum's Open Broadband initiative, established with a mission to create an open framework defining cloud-based broadband.
It was noted that Open Broadband Labs are a collaborative resource designed to support the integration, staging and testing of open source, commercial software, standards-based and vendor implementations, where vendors, integrators and operators can work together on new and coexisting solutions.
The focus of Open Broadband Labs, such as OBLA, is to accelerate the realisation of marketable and commercial new services and applications, and the migration from existing broadband infrastructures to cloud-based models featuring NFV and SDN technologies.
Under the partnership agreement, the Broadband Forum will exclusively license the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance to undertake the construction of OBLA in China and to conduct conformance and interoperability testing, migration best practices, technical due diligence and training around the project. The SDN/NFV alliance will build and manage the OBLA, while the Broadband Forum will provide technical direction, testing methodologies, a standards framework and domain expertise.
The joint initiative is intended to support the development of network cloud standards verification, testing, solution conformance and provide a proving ground for testing new services.
The Broadband Forum noted that OBLA builds on multiple ongoing and completed virtualisation and cloud projects, including the Network Enhanced Residential Gateway, which transitions functionalities from the residential gateway to the operator network, the Cloud Central Office, Fixed Access Network Sharing, SDN in the Access Network and virtual Business Gateway.
The initiative also complements the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance effort to advance the readiness for SDN commercial utilisation and promote the development of the SDN industry.
- Recently, the Broadband Forum combined with the NG-PON2 Forum to create the new NG-PON2 Council, tasked with accelerating the development of NG-PON2 technology The forum noted that it was already working on NG-PON2 through its Fiber Access Networks working group.
