Broadband Forum
We at EANTC are respected in the industry to provide a proof point for service providers that shows an innovative end-to-end concept of data center and wide area network inter connectivity, orchestration and management.
The Broadband World Forum (BBF) is the communications industry’s leading organization focused on accelerating broadband innovation, standards, and ecosystem development.
EANTC contributes to Working Text 412 (WT-412) inside the NFV-SDN Work Area. WT-412 aims to collect test cases for the BBF’s Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) architecture. This architecture converts the service providers’ central offices into a data center that host broadband related functions such as the virtual gateway and vCPE components (DHCP, Routing,.etc).
Open Broadband Lab
The first interoperability test campaign has been conducted at the Open Broadband Lab (OBLab) Europe in Berlin, Germany. The BBF has selected EANTC to host the European OBLab. OBLabs are established to validate aspects of the Broadband Forum’s standards architecture and to accelerate adoption of multi-vendor interoperable implementations. Test areas include the Network Enhanced Residential Gateway (NERG), CloudCO, Fixed Access Network Sharing, SDN in the Access Network, and the virtual Business Gateway.
EANTC as an independent party together with the BBF created an ecosystem to conduct testing in the most advanced application scenarios addressing service providers’ and enterprises’ needs. The OBLab Europe provides a platform for in-depth testing, troubleshooting, code updates, and additional verifications. It represents a great return on investment as findings can be used for further development, standardization work, and strategic product positioning.
By presenting a realistic example of CloudCO use cases the participating parties can demonstrate the maturity and applicability of their solutions. The successful test results will be published in a report to improve market visibility for vendors and products. The participating parties can directly test and improve their latest implementations on a similar level of expertise. This improves quality and reduces implementation time on customer projects. Testing with other products and vendors also demonstrates that the solutions can be used to enhance already existing installations.
Testing is organized in campaigns with remote and on-site building blocks. The first test campaign focused on specific CloudCO Application Note Tests. We invited both commercial and open source solutions in an effort to test the interoperability between solutions from different parties in multiple scenarios, improve collaboration, and accelerate development of the CloudCO ecosystem.
The underlying NFV infrastructure was initially provided by VMware. Other cloud infrastructure vendors were invited to join the test campaign as well.