Broadband Forum Plugfest advances USP, the evolution of TR-069, ahead of first public demonstration

FREMONT, Calif., Oct. 2, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- New capabilities and increased robustness of the Broadband Forum's User Services Platform (USP) have been successfully tested at a Plugfest, accelerating interoperability in the rapidly changing connected home market.

An evolution of the Broadband Forum's almost ubiquitous TR-069 standard which has nearly one billion installations worldwide, USP brings a unified, common approach to implementing, deploying and managing all types of devices in the modern connected home. The latest Plugfest brought together leading industry innovators, including ARRIS International plc, Nokia, QA Cafe and first-time participants Axiros and Greenwave Systems, with interoperability achieved across all participants' products.

Highlights of the session included the use of validation tools provided by QA Cafe and the testing of a Greenwave Systems' gateway with IoT proxy capability on a smart light that was managed and controlled via USP. Interoperability was also achieved through a proxy element that allowed a STOMP-based USP Controller to actively communicate with a CoAP-based USP Agent.

"In this second USP Plugfest, we laid the foundations of conformance and testing which will, in turn, enable the creation of interoperable, reliable and robust solutions," said Jason Walls, Co-Director of the Broadband User Services (BUS) Work Area at Broadband Forum and Director of Technical Marketing at QA Cafe. "The result will be greater and faster market adoption of USP by service providers, vendors, component manufacturers, and developers globally. That, combined with its backwards compatibility and ability to co-exist with TR-069, makes USP really revolutionary for everyone who is looking towards the future of the connected home."

John Blackford, Co-Director of the Broadband User Services (BUS) Work Area, member of the Broadband Forum's Board of Directors, and Product Management Director at ARRIS, added: "By achieving this level of interoperability and industry collaboration, service providers using USP-derived solutions can overcome emerging complexities in home networking. These solutions comprise a modern, scalable platform that allows service providers to monetize a range of new services across Wi-Fi and IoT devices in the connected home."

Many of the industry's leading Auto-Configuration Server (ACS) vendors are embracing USP and are updating their TR-069 ACS solutions to support its expanded functionality, simplifying global service provider adoption. A further catalyst to adoption will be the ability of USP to support multi-tenant remote management, meaning that USP can complement any TR-069-compliant ACS. Thus, service providers can augment their TR-069-based management system with the powerful new features of a USP-based management system in a subscriber's home network, such as advanced home Wi-Fi management or subscriber self-management, with solutions from different ACS vendors. Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) within the connected home can be upgraded to USP via a simple service provider managed software upgrade and can co-exist in the same subscriber home.

The Plugfest will be closely followed by the first-ever public demonstration of USP which will take place at Broadband World Forum, held at the Messe Berlin, in Germany, from Tuesday, 23 October through to Thursday, 25 October 2018.

A webinar – "An overview of the User Services Platform (USP/TR-369)" – will be held on Wednesday, 17 October at 3pm UTC. The webinar will be hosted by ARRIS and QA Cafe. To register, visit: https://goo.gl/jfkEpi.

For more information about the USP, including details of how to get involved in the project and participate in the next wave of "Plugfests" in 2019, visit: https://www.broadband-forum.org/projects/connected-user/user-services-platform.

About the Broadband Forum
The Broadband Forum, a non-profit industry organization, is focused on engineering smarter and faster broadband networks. The Forum's flagship TR-069 CPE WAN Management Protocol has nearly 1 billion installations worldwide.

The Broadband Forum's work defines best practices specifications and software for global networks, enables new revenue-generating service and content delivery, establishes technology migration strategies and service management for the connected home, Cloud, access and 5G broadband ecosystem. There are more than 70 ongoing Technical Committee projects which embrace all relevant emerging technologies.

The Forum's Open Broadband strategy brings together open source agility and standards-based architecture to enable large-scale markets. The Forum develops test interoperability and certification specifications and programs to accelerate deployment.  Visit https://www.broadband-forum.org for free technical reports, papers and videos. Twitter @Broadband_Forum.

For further information please contact Brian Dolby on +44 (0) 7899 914168 or [email protected] or Jayne Brooks on +44 (0) 1636 704 888 or [email protected].     

SOURCE The Broadband Forum

Related Links

http://www.broadband-forum.org