July 28, 2016

The Broadband Forum today announced it has entered a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Open Networking Laboratory (ON.Lab), with the aim of accelerating the development of future broadband requirements and standards in close collaboration with open source projects, as well as the production deployment of new services, enabling its stakeholders to realize business benefits of emerging technologies such as SDN, NFV and Cloud.

The signing of the agreement formalizes and extends the collaboration between Broadband Forum and ON.Lab which began during the build-up to the Forum’s recent special meeting on broadband network evolution in Atlanta. The terms of the MOU will enable the CORDTM Project community to understand the requirements of next-generation broadband services at the Forum and demonstrate how these can be met with the CORD platform. The work of the community will in turn inform future Broadband Forum standards based on real-world open source implementations and speed up the time-to-market of solutions for providers and vendors.

The emergence of the Cloud Central Office (CO) was one of the key discussion points of the Atlanta meeting, with ON.Lab holding demonstrations and presentations of the CORD project. CORD, or Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center, integrates NFV and SDN to bring data center economics and cloud flexibility to both the telco Central Office and the entire access network. Residential, enterprise and mobile applications of the CORD infrastructure were shown at the meeting, as well as discussions around the business case of simplifying the economies of traditional data centers. Cloud CO will use CORD, an open source reference implementation, as an input into the architecture definition process. Cloud CO use cases can also be tested on CORD, in order for CORD to evaluate their implementation.

Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh said: “Working with ON.Lab on CORD has been a very fruitful exercise and we’re pleased to formalize the arrangement with this MOU. The CORD project is an important example of the vast amount of work being done in this area and collaborating with projects like this one will be key for the Broadband Forum as we look to work more closely with open source projects to help our members feel the business benefits of SDN, NFV, Cloud and other new technologies.”

ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar said: “The Cloud CO as a concept is going to be a vital part of our work going forward and with it, operators will be able to quickly and efficiently deliver new technologies into the central office. With the help of the Broadband Forum, ON.Lab will continue to meet the challenges of re-imagining the telco CO as concepts and use cases emerge.”