Broadband Forum and the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance have teamed up to establish a joint broadband laboratory in China aimed at accelerating the evolution to cloud-enabled networks.
The companies signed a partnership agreement in Beijing to establish the Open Broadband Laboratory Asia (OBLA).
Under the agreement, Broadband Forum will exclusively license the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance to undertake the construction of OBLA in China, and to conduct conformance and interoperability testing, migration best practices, technical due diligence and training for the project.
The Alliance will build and manage the laboratory, while the Forum will contribute technical direction, testing methods, a standards framework and domain expertise.
“As operators look to bring the efficiencies of data centers and cloud technologies to the network, gradually transforming it to a software-based infrastructure, it is incredibly important that we speed up standards, testing, conformance and best practice to ensure smarter, programmable and faster networks that deliver leading edge capability for operators and world-class experience for their customers,” commented BT's Kevin Foster, the chairman of the Broadband Forum.
“This new lab facility is a strategic and natural evolution of the Forum’s ongoing work on virtualization and cloud, with almost every project in our current scope now connected to these next-generation network technologies.”
SDN/NFV alliance and China Telecom Beijing Research Institute president Wei Leping added that the core goal of the lab will be establishing standards and a unified framework for network cloud and SDN.
Wei stated that the lack of such standards “leads to fragmentation in the industry and defeats interoperability, slowing the industry’s development.”
The initiative likewise forms part of the Forum's newly-launched Open Broadband initiative, which aims to create an open framework for cloud-based broadband.