The first ever specifications for the virtual Residential Gateway were released today, as the Broadband Forum concluded work on a landmark project to bring the potential of virtualization into the home. The Network Enhanced Residential Gateway (TR-317) provides requirements for an end-to-end architecture, creating a flexible and agile environment. TR-317’s virtual Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) eliminates the need to provision and attach new services directly to an end user’s Residential Gateway and enables Service Providers to do this centrally from their Cloud infrastructures, giving the potential for an enhanced customer experience and significant cost savings.
Service Providers will be able to deploy new services faster and personalize end-user packages, eventually creating significant additional revenue streams. Quality of Service could also be enforced on a per device, per user and/or per service basis, improving the broadband customer experience, which is particularly important with the advent of new and more demanding services.
The new specification is one of the enablers for the Broadband Forum’s Broadband 20/20 vision which focuses on specific new broadband home and business opportunities that leverage SDN, the NFV distributed compute / network model, Internet of Things and ultrafast technologies.
TR-317 addresses the current heterogeneous nature of the residential gateway which makes it difficult for a telco to evolve existing gateway models, meaning the deployment of new features or services is often delayed, expensive and sometimes not even possible as some old CPE may not have sufficient resources to support a given set of features.
‘Local services’ will be shifted from the home to the network, providing users with highly reliable and expandable virtual storage, which can be provisioned on a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ basis. The machine-to-machine (M2M) Home Automation Box will also move to the network, providing enhanced and easily-upgradeable M2M services.
Parental control per device – for example, to limit services accessed by children – will also be enabled, along with improved diagnosis/troubleshooting/maintenance services due to operators being able to virtually insert a diagnosis tool in the extended home network to troubleshoot problems and support the customer.
Following the release of this initial document, further work to extend its capabilities, as well as new work around the Cloud Central Office (CO) project, will be carried out. This will include evolving the TR-069 protocol to manage the Network Enhanced Residential Gateway components (the Bridged Residential Gateway and the virtual Gateway) and associated services. Requirements for the design of the virtual gateway itself are also being discussed, while the possibility of adding in a capability to allow third parties to provide services via the operator is also being looked at.
For more details on TR-317 and how it will impact the industry, watch this video interview with Broadband Forum member Gregory Dalle: https://youtu.be/buOd6YWKSlo
For more information on the Broadband Forum’s work, visit: http://www.broadband-forum.org