Broadband Forum demos CloudCO and OB-BAA

At Broadband World Forum (BBWF) 2019 this week in Amsterdam, the Broadband Forum is showcasing its Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) and Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) initiatives.

The CloudCO demonstration leverages a combination of SDN automation and virtualization, open source innovation and Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband Labs (OB-Labs) infrastructure. This will show zero touch service provisioning of a multi-vendor access network containing NETCONF/YANG and SNMP access nodes via standard and vendor specific adapters, all through a single portal. It will also take advantage of major enhancements to Broadband Forum’s OB-BAA open source project and a soon-to-be-released new Application Note, APPN-446 – ONAP and CloudCO integration for Residential Broadband HSIA Service.

The OB-BAA specifies Northbound Interfaces (NBI), Core Components and Southbound Adaptation Interfaces (SAI) for functions associated with access network devices that have been virtualized, facilitating co-existence and seamless migration.

“The CloudCO and OB-BAA demonstration will represent a radical recasting of services deployment and orchestration to the benefit of the industry,” said Geoff Burke, Chief Marketing Officer at Broadband Forum. “CloudCO and OB-BAA are among our Open Broadband initiatives which aim to advance network migration to cloud-based broadband infrastructures and help service providers realize the possibilities of SDN and NFV. This demonstration will highlight the innovative work of the global Open Broadband Labs and the benefits of industry-wide collaboration and interoperability.”

Specifically, the demo illustrates a multi-vendor network use case in which a customer making a service request has the service created and activated by the service provider, only then to relocate to a new location and find the service seamlessly reactivated. This will show a plethora of benefits which are available to service providers through CloudCO, including reductions in the costs of validating, engineering, and improving operation of services.

BT, Swisscom, and TIM will sponsor the demonstration, reinforcing the important role open standards have to play in operators’ future networks.

Access vendors participating in the demonstration include Nokia, Altice Labs, and DZS which will all leverage an OB-Labs infrastructure enabled by The European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC), The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) and VMware.