Earlier this month the Broadband Forum (BBF) published its latest quarterly subscription and technology figures for the worldwide broadband market (click). Despite the recent near-global economic downturn, growth in the high speed communications sector is exhibiting considerable resilience. So too is the piggy-backed IPTV business. Telecom Redux took the opportunity to talk to the BBF’s COO Robin Mersh about the aims of his organisation, and where he thinks the broadband industry might be heading.

TR: Could you briefly describe the background, objectives and working methods of the BBF?

RM: Following our union with the IP/MPLS Forum, our scope has changed, although we only had to tweak the mission statement a little bit.

We are focused on driving the success of broadband as a technology solution. Originally that was more focused on DSL… back when we started in 1994, when we were the DSL Forum. But things gradually progressed to the point where we were more generically in pursuit of broadband optimisation as a whole, specifically encompassing fibre technologies as our members requirements grew and fed into this work. With the union, our scope is still technology agnostic but our focus is more completely end-to-end from core network through to the user.

Our mission statement reads: ‘We develop multi-service broadband packet networking specifications addressing interoperability, architecture and management.Our work enables home, business and converged broadband services, encompassing customer, access and backbone networks.’

Underpinning this mission are activities that drive interoperability because that’s the way to get to mass deployment and reduce costs. We also develop best practice in terms of architecture, network provisioning and maintenance of services.  We continue to build upon the critically important work we did in developing the CPE WAN Management Protocol – TR-069 - and all the related object models that are simplifying the adoption of the next generation of online devices.

The end goal is really mass deployment of broadband and empowering networks to deliver all the quality services the end user demands.

TR: Has the BBF’s focus expanded and changed over time? How did the tie-up with the IP/MPLS Forum come about?

RM: For us growth has been very much organic. We initially focused on transport layer specifications for ADSL improvements, acting as an advocacy group at the very beginning. When DSL was really small, and starting off its life, we did an awful lot of marketing and popularising of the technology, and making sure people understood it. Obviously that diminished somewhat when everyone got to know exactly what DSL was and could deliver.

As our service provider and vendor members became more interested in other forms of high speed broadband – GPON, point-to-point fibre and EPON – the one thing they didn’t want to do was to have to engineer and manage these diverse networks differently. They wanted to have an end-to-end network with one common architecture, and be able to manage services across the network using a single management platform.

In this goal, our work frequently began to touch areas also addressed within the IP/MPLS Forum such as access aggregation.  This got the interest of the IP/MPLS Forum, as they saw that our focus encompassed so much more than it had at our beginning. The IP/MPLS Forum core and access aggregation work fitted in very well within our expanded scope.

So you could argue that both organisations were pretty much converging in the same kinds of areas technically. As the IP/MPLS Forum were getting more interested in the access, the Broadband Forum were going the opposite way. As we were doing more and more architecture work and looking at areas like Quality of Service and Quality of Experience, we were moving from access to aggregation to core.

So there was a good mix there, and now we have a story that is so much more end-to-end than previously. Most of the issues we are looking at are end-to-end issues.

TR: Looking at the BBF’s latest research, what general conclusions do you draw about the state of health of the broadband sector?

RM: We’re really quite pleased with the results from Point Topic's last report. Broadband certainly isn’t immune from what’s happening in the wider economy, but uptake is showing that broadband is viewed as a necessity. It’s fair to say we have been pretty resilient. Although the figures may be a little bit lower than in recent quarters, the Q2 figures are still robust and there is good growth.

Some of the regional numbers are very strong, especially in emerging markets. And some of the IPTV numbers have also been very strong.

So the general conclusion is: broadband is resilient and high bandwidth services are being driven very hard. Fibre deployments you see in specific regions are doing very well too. There’s very good reason to be upbeat.

TR: Is increased broadband deployment a feasible mechanism for re-starting the global economy?

RM: People are talking about broadband being seen very much as one of the key economic drivers. Today it is accepted that broadband is a key indicator of how developed an economy is, so I suppose it stands to reason that broadband is stimulative.  Broadband can provide access to a global marketplace, bringing opportunities like never before to developing nations.

TR: What do you think the future is for wireline DSL, and will it inevitably lose ground to FTTx and broadband wireless?

RM: I think DSL’s definitely got some shots left in its locker. I say that for a few reasons.

First off, there are more than 1 billion regular telephone lines in the world capable of carrying DSL services and broadband experts in the field are getting more speed out of the technology than ever before. Currently more than 445 million of these lines are in service today, but that leaves more than 50% of potential deployment.  Existing lines, high speed options - this is a minimum investment route to serving the mass majority with broadband.

If you look at things like bonding and vectoring, and at various Broadband Forum projects examining things like line profiling for multi-play services, it’s clear that there are various ways you can get more performance out of what you have. And obviously there’s some big economic incentives for doing that.

Another reason is that, even with more mature broadband deployments and the migration that you see to fibre, there’s still plenty of the world where you have Internet users on narrowband. There’s still a lot of potential there. I’ve heard numbers for developing countries where tens of millions are still on narrowband.

Again, even with triple play services, there are plenty of service providers using ADSL2+ - it’s one of the most popular ways of delivering IPTV, for instance. And the DSL numbers for the last quarter show it’s still growing at a very good rate and generally the growth is on par with other technologies.

Having said that, you certainly have to acknowledge that there is migration to fibre deployments. As a body we address alternative broadband technologies – and we do think that the future is one of hybrid networks of DSL and fibre (currently making up a combined 76% of all broadband adoption), and in certain areas you’ll see fixed wireless as well.  And the cable community of course has its story as well.

TR: In practice, is the BBF interested in wireless?

RM: We’ve done a lot of work on, and had a lot of discussion around, the relationship between an architecture for a fixed wireless deployment such as WiMAX, and the architecture you need in place for fixed line broadband. There obviously needs to be a relationship between those two things because very often service providers are deploying both.

There are some other touch points too – for example, femtocells. We’ve developed a data model so that you can manage femtocells via TR-069. As we’re moving forward, convergence is really happening.

But it doesn’t mean we’re going to write things directly for wireless services and networks. There are organisations that do that kind of work, but we work closely with those organisations.

TR: Does the BBF have interest in any ‘green’ initiatives?

RM: Absolutely. We’ve looked into a few areas of energy efficiency. One of the stories that isn’t picked up as much as we, the industry, think it should be picked up is the idea of what you can do remotely. These dematerialisation benefits come in many forms, particularly where users’ travel can be reduced as a result of using virtual services over broadband or service providers are able to provision and manage remotely instead of sending out trucks for each new service installation.

Currently, what we’re doing in terms of reducing carbon footprint is looking at things like low power mode with ADSL2+. We’ve also been looking at how you do the same with broadband related CPE. We think we can have a very positive role to play in smart metering as well; through our remote management specification – TR 069 – there are ways you can be managing smart meters remotely, and managing energy directly.

TR: What are a couple of important broadband trends to be on the look-out for?

RM: I would say the network convergence trend is the biggest one. That’s probably the biggest piece of architecture work that we’ll be involved with over the next year.  We are talking about a network that’s delivering various services over multiple access technologies. Mobile backhaul, business services and residential high speed broadband all have different requirements and you need a robust and responsive architecture that can deal with all of those.

Then there’s the take-up of fibre technology and the various kinds of investments happening from both private and government-sponsored broadband stimulus programmes. We are going to carry on seeing those fibre deployments happening, and that will certainly have a major effect within the industry.

TR: Thank you.