Broadband Forum Releases OB-BAA 4.0 Offers Operators Greater Flexibility and Reduced Costs for Building Their Broadband Networks
Summary
“As network automation continues to emerge at an accelerated pace, operators will need to think about how they make upgrades compatible with their currently deployed architecture to avoid the costly and disruptive practice of starting from scratch,” said Tim Carey, OB-BAA Project Lead at Broadband Forum. “Release 4.0 offers enhanced management of ONUs using virtualized OMCI and reduced repeated work for operators, as well as the key to unlock greater interoperability and programmability in broadband networks,” said Dechao Zhang, Principal Researcher, China Mobile. “Our collaborative efforts mark a major milestone for the broadband industry as we continue to address the problems operators globally face with evolving and updating their current multi-vendor OLT and ONU fiber broadband architectures to be software-defined and cloud-driven.” Using features that existed in previous releases along with its virtualized ONU management and control relay capabilities, a key accomplishment of the latest release of OB-BAA is the full support of OLT capabilities for white box solutions in the OB-BAA framework. “Virtualized OMCI complements existing functions such as performance and configuration management, operators can now easily introduce white box solutions, and this subsequently offers a path from those that are vendor-aligned to a mixed vendor and white box evolution.” Release 4.0 of OB-BAA can be downloaded directly from Broadband Forum’s website and can be found here: https://obbaa.broadband-forum.org/. Its working groups collaborate to define best practices for global networks, enable new revenue-generating service and content delivery, establish technology migration strategies, and engineer critical device, service & development management tools in the home and business IP networking infrastructure.