From June 5th to 8th, Altice Labs participated as a sponsor at the Q2 meeting of the Broadband Forum (BBF), at the Hilton Hotel in Porto. The BBF is where the key standards that support connectivity solutions are developed. Altice Labs took advantage of the proximity of the venue and actively participated in the meeting, contributing to the evolution of the access component, with a focus on the Cloud Central Office, where Altice Labs leads some components that are currently being developed and follow other ongoing projects.

During the opening session, Alcino Lavrador gave a presentation on Altice Labs. In addition to this speech, five employees from the Network Systems Development department also took part in this event. Among these employees, was André Brízido, who recently became co-editor of the WT-451a1 norm, in a task force to define WT-477 (Disaggregated OLT).

These meetings helped to promote our solutions to potential customers. In addition to the various presentations, Altice Labs had multiple promotional materials on display and gave each participant merchandise and a promotional flyer.

 

André Brízido is co-editor of the WT-451a1 norm

With the purpose of making telecommunications networks more flexible, scalable and programmable, operators have been adopting SDN/NFV technologies. In this context, the BBF has been defining norms that together define the CloudCO architecture. Among other things, this architecture is based on the virtualization of functions that traditionally run on physical equipment. An example of these functions is the OMCI stack that OLTs (Optical Line Terminal) use to communicate with ONTs (Optical Network Terminal).

The TR-451 norm (vOMCI Specification), published in June 2022, defines a set of interfaces that make it possible to virtualize the OMCI stack, speeding up support for new types of ONT without having to change the OLT software. It should be noted that the number of OLTs owned by an operator can be very high and the upgrade process can have an impact on the service. In the meantime, some “gaps” in the standard have been identified, which will give rise to a new edition – TR-451 ammendment 1.

As a result of Altice Labs’ contributions to BBF norms and projects in recent years, and the experience gained in the OB-BAA (Open Broadband: Broadband Access Abstraction) open-source project, André Brízido, from the Network Systems Development department, has been accepted as co-editor of this new edition of TR-451 ammendment 1.

BBF standards editors are responsible for editing the final document by aggregating the contributions of the various BBF members. The editors must also act as leaders/mediators in order to achieve consensus during periodic meetings and advance the definition of the standard.

Finally, the editors and their company have their name published prominently in the initial section of the standard.

The BBF is one of the most important normalization bodies in the context of the access network (which includes OLTs/ONTs).