The DSL Forum, an international consortium of more than 200 member organisations, has announced a major initiative to fuel the growth of next-generation broadband services. Taking into account the variety of ways people are beginning to enjoy ‘quadruple play’ services – voice, video, data and mobile – the new BroadbandSuite initiative expands the DSL Forum’s mission beyond DSL to address interoperability and management across DSL, fibre and alternative broadband technologies. For the past 12 years, the DSL Forum has helped to define key infrastructure and procedures needed to drive global DSL growth. Today, DSL is the dominant broadband technology, used by more than 150mn subscribers worldwide for IP-based services that range from ‘simple’ high speed data transfer to multi-channel HDTV, video on-demand, videoconferencing and VoIP. Service providers are evolving their access infrastructures to serve more customers with newer services through adoption of a common set of specifications, including DSL Forum Technical Reports (TR). DSL Forum members are building on their achievements to develop specifications that embrace multiple broadband access methods, applying best practices developed for DSL to the range of access technologies.

BroadbandSuite extends the concept of traditional end-to-end solutions by developing an access and management platform responsive to devices beyond the customer gateway as well as the distribution network. This ‘blueprint’ is designed to minimise provisioning and maintenance issues for service and application providers who must support vast and growing requirements of new applications and hardware. With BroadbandSuite, components work together seamlessly, delivering a high quality consumer experience vital for driving next-generation voice, video, data and mobile services.
www.dslforum.org