The Broadband Forum's Wholesale Access project will define the service requirements, best practices, and technical solutions needed to promote wholesale access in broadband networks in the era of fiber to the premises (FTTP) and cloud networks. It will drive technical innovation, efficiency, and automation, while maintaining consistently high quality of service across the shared infrastructure for both existing and new deployments. This, in turn, is expected to have a positive impact across the entire business value chain.
This presentation will describe how access network owners can offer their existing access infrastructure to retail service providers, as well as content, application, and cloud service providers. This approach helps established BSPs potentially generate new revenue from their unused network capacity, while also providing new providers with a faster way to market their services.
“As one of Europe’s leading wholesale operators, FiberCop is proud to contribute its expertise to this initiative. Wholesale access has been inherently supported by the Broadband Forum’s network architecture for the past 20 years, and this project takes best practices from copper-based broadband and reshapes and evolves them for fiber and cloud networks,” said Daniele Franceschini, Director of Technology and Innovation at FiberCop. “The project will identify and define best innovations, solutions, and practices for service providers, covering topics ranging from innovative line testing to domain monitoring, service differentiation, and far-end computing. In addition to co-editing this new BBF project, FiberCop is coordinating a collaborative team of BBF members committed to contributing to these topics.”.
Focusing on the most widespread deployment types, the initiative addresses wholesale access deployment models applicable to different regulations worldwide. As part of the project, Broadband Forum members can collaborate and share knowledge about their own experiences and advise on lessons learned and challenges from real-world deployments.
"The project will prove incredibly enlightening and will help present opportunities to implement 'open' access within an ecosystem where the network is provided by a wholesale network operator, while the subscriber relationship is owned by an independent retail service provider," said Daniel Willis, general manager of Advanced Access Technologies at NBN Co.
“Bringing together real-world insights from established wholesale operators represents a significant milestone for the broadband industry. Our goal is to use this information to empower service providers and networks of all sizes to help deliver broadband more efficiently over shared infrastructure, while maintaining a high level of quality and service,” Willis continued.
Driven by the requirements of the Broadband Service Platform (BSP), the first phase of the initiative will establish a holistic framework for wholesale service models, use cases, requirements, and best practices, in line with the Broadband Forum's service-oriented vision. The project will offer an opportunity to collaborate with other relevant standards development organizations to create a harmonized and globally applicable framework.
