Broadband Forum and prpl Foundation Unite to Create a Secure Cross-platform Service Delivery Framework

The joint collaboration between the two industry organizations is extending USP to become the backbone of smart gateways that enable a services ecosystem

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Service providers will benefit from greater agility, faster time-to-market, delivery of improved operational support and ultimately the ability to significantly enhance end-user experience thanks to the latest collaboration between Broadband Forum and prpl Foundation. This will help create a truly interoperable ecosystem of 3rd-party applications and services and allow Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) to be seamlessly upgraded with new innovative services.

The joint effort will see the two industry organizations enhance existing home gateway architecture to enable service providers to more easily deploy, activate and manage portable 3rd-party applications and services, such as Wi-Fi analytics, security and more onto Wi-Fi routers and Home Gateways. Leveraging Broadband Forum’s User Services Platform (USP), it will open up new opportunities for service providers to deliver value to their subscribers.

The expanded collaboration will explore how USP (TR-369) can be extended to enable “microservices” in home gateways, that will enhance customer experience by improving velocity of service delivery to app-enabled CPE such as Wi-Fi routers and gateways and meet the complexities of a modular firmware architecture.

“The Broadband Forum is very pleased to be joining forces with prpl Foundation to extend USP and the TR-181 Data Models to enable an ecosystem of 3^rd-party applications and services,” Broadband Forum Chairman and BUS Work Area Director John Blackford said. “This ensures fast time-to-market of innovative solutions that are portable across a variety of different CPE platforms. The result will ensure service providers can quickly deliver more value to subscribers and improve overall customer experience.”

The prpl Foundation is collaborating with Broadband Forum in developing a high-level Application Programming Interface (API) that enables cross-platform portability of applications and services among different CPE, leveraging USP as its backbone. The collaboration enables the extension of the widely utilized TR-181 and USP open standards, building an open API and reference implementation to develop and deploy connected home and business services.

“This collaboration between Broadband Forum and prpl Foundation is uniting the industry by converging various CPE software platforms around a cross-platform service delivery framework,” Leonard Dauphinee, President at prpl Foundation said. “Without such convergence, it had become increasingly difficult to upgrade CPE with new innovative services such as parental controls, security solutions, and streaming services.”

The work leverages USP's standardized messaging and data models to allow local, real-time applications and services to interoperate with CPE execution environments, while securely and efficiently segmenting their data and configuration information to facilitate an open application ecosystem. This enables an architecture for organizations to develop and rapidly deploy new services and solutions for the connected end-user.

“This important collaboration brings together service providers, silicon providers, system integrators, platform vendors, 3^rd-party application developers and open-source developers, all committed to developing a robust microservices architecture to enable service providers to differentiate and scale their business by quickly deploying new services, including services customized on a per subscriber basis,” Broadband Forum President Mike Talbert said.

About Broadband Forum

Broadband Forum is the communications industry’s leading open standards development organization focused on accelerating broadband innovation, standards, and ecosystem development. Our members’ passion – delivering on the promise of broadband by enabling smarter and faster broadband networks and a thriving broadband ecosystem.

Broadband Forum is an open, non-profit industry organization composed of the industry’s leading broadband operators, vendors, thought leaders who are shaping the future of broadband, and observers who closely track our progress. Its work to date has been the foundation for broadband’s global proliferation and innovation. For example, the Forum’s flagship TR-069 CPE WAN Management Protocol has nearly 1 billion installations worldwide.

Broadband Forum’s projects span across 5G, Connected Home, Cloud, and Access. Its working groups collaborate to define best practices for global networks, enable new revenue-generating service and content delivery, establish technology migration strategies, and engineer critical device, service & development management tools in the home and business IP networking infrastructure. We develop multi-service broadband packet networking specifications addressing architecture, device and service management, software data models, interoperability and certification in the broadband market.

Our free technical reports and white papers can be found at https://www.broadband-forum.org/.

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For more information about the Broadband Forum, please go to https://www.broadband-forum.org or follow @Broadband_Forum on Twitter. For further information please contact Brian Dolby on [phone] or [e-mail] or Jayne Brooks on [phone] or [e-mail].

About prpl Foundation

The prpl Foundation is a collaborative community dedicated to Open-Source and Open-APIs, with particular focus on carrier-grade software for Broadband Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) as specified by Operator members. prpl Foundation brings together Service Providers, OEMs, system integrators, chip vendors, and application developers to harmonize home network architecture, then commonize a reference implementation of standardized Open-Source infrastructure built atop Open-APIs. prpl is enabling a Service Delivery Ecosystem including innovative third party applications that can be quickly and easily deployed across different CPE platforms. Its 40 members worldwide include BT, Claro, DTAG, Orange, and Vodafone.

More information at https://prplFoundation.org/