The Broadband Forum has announced its Wholesale Access project, which is designed to provide broadband service providers (BSPs) with clearer guidance on sharing network infrastructure for wholesale use.
The Broadband Forum expects the project to spark innovation in a key area of the broadband industry by defining service requirements, best practices, and technical solutions for better wholesale access in broadband networks.
According to the Broadband Forum, the intent is to maintain high quality service while at the same time driving technical innovation and automation, which, combined with innovation, should help provide additional customer choice.
The Broadband Forum Wholesale Access project will outline how access network owners can offer their existing access infrastructure to retail service providers, as well as content, application, and cloud service providers. The first part of the project will establish a holistic framework for wholesale service models, use cases, requirements, and best practices.
“Wholesale access has been inherently supported by the Broadband Forum’s network architecture over the past 20 years, and this project takes the best practices from copper‑based broadband to reshape and evolve them for fiber and cloud networks,” Daniele Franceschini, FiberCop head of technology and innovation, said in a prepared statement.
“The project will identify and define the best innovations, solutions, and practices for Service Providers, covering topics from innovative line testing to domain monitoring, service differentiation, and far-edge computing. Besides serving as co-editor of this new BBF project, FiberCop is coordinating a collaborative team of BBF members committed to contributing on these subjects.”
The Broadband Forum Wholesale Access project may be timely as fiber deployment expands. A recent Fiber Broadband Association report found that more than 11.8 million homes added fiber connections last year, bringing the total percentage of households with the technology in the U.S. to more than 60%.
