Broadband Forum brings IoT home with new USP standard

The Broadband Forum today published its User Services Platform (USP) – a new standard for implementing, deploying and managing all types of devices in the broadband home.

For the first time, USP brings a unified, common approach to securely deploy, manage, and control network-aware consumer electronics, including home and enterprise Wi-Fi, Internet of Things (IoT), and more. This enables a vast number of devices from different suppliers to be integrated into service providers’ offerings, enabling them to offer new, revenue generating services to end-users. “As an evolution of the popular TR-069 standard, USP makes use of the same data models, but instead of simply having a single Auto Configuration Server, there are now many end points that control not only the devices but also individual executables on each one,” said Barbara Stark, of AT&T, USP Project Lead at Broadband Forum.

“This means deployments with IoT devices, smart Wi-Fi, set-top boxes, and smart gateways can be controlled by anyone in the household, while permission levels for service providers can be created to allow any necessary updates or troubleshooting of the network and devices connected to it. Ultimately, we designed USP to be flexible, scalable and secure.”

With USP, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and end-users can perform lifecycle management of connected devices and carry out upgrades, for example, for critical security updates.

Newly installed or purchased devices and virtual services can also be easily added, while customer support is improved by remote monitoring and troubleshooting of connected devices, services and home network links.

The specification enables secure control of IoT, smart home and smart networking functions and helps map the home network to manage service quality and monitor threats.

Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh said: “TR-069 has seen great success, with 800 million TR-069 CPE WAN management protocol devices worldwide, and the time is right to move this into the hyper-connected, virtualized world and provide an evolved specification to enable the industry to provide for and monetize the opportunities presented by modern connected users and homes.”

Work on the USP specification was carried out by the Broadband User Services (BUS) Work Area which is led by Co-Directors John Blackford, of ARRIS International plc® , who is also a Broadband Forum board member, and Jason Walls of QA Cafe.

“This ground-breaking standard was made possible through the combined input of many of the world’s leading service providers who use TR-069 and the technical expertise of the BUS community, including participants from AT&T, Axiros, Google, Greenwave Systems, Huawei, NEC, Nokia, QA Cafe and ARRIS,” added Blackford.

To find out more about the USP specification, the motivation behind it and the promise it holds for the IoT, watch this video interview with Walls: https://youtu.be/dogt1Ewb9dw The USP specification can be found on the web at (http://usp.technology)[http://usp.technology].