Open Source and Open Standard Synergy: the Tools for Network Innovation

January 17, 2025

Blog

Today the ‘Connected Home’ is no longer a visionary pipedream, but a reality, with smart devices quickly becoming staples in our homes and making our lives simpler (hopefully). Standardization, well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and seamless interoperability between different platforms and applications act as the key pillars to achieving ubiquitous connectivity in the home.

Broadband Service Providers (BSPs) have the considerable task of upgrading and transforming their networks to cater and provide a seamless experience for all users in the connected home.   BSPs must enhance their management of end-user experiences, effectively measure and monetize new opportunities, and deliver services that extend beyond a connection point.

For the broadband network to thrive in the ever-evolving connected home landscape, industry wide adoption of these capabilities is crucial. The key to this lies in the synergy of open source and open standards.

Protecting existing investment

Network transformation is no easy feat. While cloud technologies are introducing advanced automation opportunities for business operations, protecting existing network investment remains a key consideration for BSPs. Due diligence must be spent ensuring that the network transformation facilitates seamless coexistence and interoperability with existing platforms and equipment, as well as virtualized, disaggregated systems and future technologies.

Cloud technologies, such as Software-defined networking (SDN) and Network function virtualization (NFV), can aid in the process, providing flexibility based on user demand and allowing for the better allocation of resources. This avoids a complete ‘rip and replace’ strategy when BSPs are operating or upgrading their networks.

Equally, adopting automation will help streamline the management and operation of the network to truly power transformation. Driving a more agile and scalable infrastructure, automation will enable the faster deployment of services and greater responsiveness to customer demands.

Open source software is a crucial component for all of this as it provides a blueprint for BSPs to help implement and adopt these practices and achieve the objectives set out. But of course, that is not the only factor to consider.

Providing the blueprint

When it comes to upgrading and future proofing BSP networks, open source software cannot act alone. The adoption of open standards helps to define lasting, normative descriptions and the requirements of the systems, interfaces, or APIs needed.

Standards lay down a common and uniform set of rules and design principles for companies across the broadband ecosystem, large and small, to adhere to. They are the backbone that underpin giant leaps forward in innovation and the growth of many industry verticals. In the computing world, standards continue to play a crucial, albeit often understated, role. From the language used to create websites, to the most used format for playing audio files, they have all been developed using standards. As new technologies are constantly introduced, it is imperative that standards are updated and refined to remain relevant for companies in the modern age.

Not only do they help BSPs better manage connected devices, but open standards promise an implementation path and a best of breed deployment strategy. They help align the industry on common architecture and future migration approaches.

Similarly, open source software is no new phenomenon. Back in the late 1990s, the concept of creating software through open collaboration emerged. This culminated in the development of a variety of systems from web browsers to operating systems. It was viewed as a vehicle to accelerate development times and deliver a blueprint for the industry to follow.

Open source promises improved flexibility and innovation, while open standards bring greater efficiencies, discipline and global scale. By marrying those complementary technologies together, we will see cost-effective development approaches, sustained network transformations and the universal delivery of future broadband access technologies and services.

The power of open source

Open source software provides device and equipment vendors with a code base that they can integrate into their devices or use as a reference implementation ahead of their own deployments. It ensures a “head start” for software developers to base their implementations on. Vendors can use the published specification and existing standardized data models and integrate it within their existing systems. In turn enabling a faster time-to-market of their own solutions.

These open source implementations can also provide early, and invaluable feedback to the standardization processes.  An early open source implementation may uncover areas within a specification that require additional detail, changes to ease implementation, or adaptions to promote interoperability between implementations.

Open source delivers the foundations and can be the baseline platform for more services and applications, with updates to the code available as the implementation matures. Participating and collaborating in an open source community is a much more attractive proposition compared to costly development associated with completely proprietary or closed source solutions. Those involved can access the community developed and tested source code and be part of the development process.

Facilitating innovation, interoperability and integration testing

In many cases where an innovative solution - such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and energy efficiency - is being developed or researched, the activities are often enabled by access to open source. For example, if developers want to add AI to a network function as part of a Research and Development project, they can save time by using a pre-built code rather than building a new network function and starting from scratch.  If the research and development proves out the concept being studied, researchers can focus on the AI topics and their innovation, even if the final intention is to integrate the new code or approach to a commercial network function. 

Alongside this, BSPs are also identifying new tactics to streamline projects from development and test stages to real-world deployments. They can embrace principles from modern Development and operations (DevOps) approaches for cohesive integration. Open source initiatives – such as Broadband Forum’s open broadband projects - deliver open source reference implementations and development kits to support greater network scalability.

Collaborative efforts bring many benefits, such as early trials and adoption. This has been demonstrated with collaboration between open broadband labs, such as the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory, BSPs, and vendors enabling rapid prototyping and demonstrations [e.g. Broadband Innovation Demos].

But there is still more work to be done industry-wide. As open source implementations are being created for more components of the network, including Linux Foundation’s Broadband and OpenDaylight and Broadband Forum’s OB-BAA, OB-CAS, and OB-STEER projects, there is an increasing need for those individual projects to collaborate and perform integration testing.

That is a challenge that has not yet been solved by the industry, largely because there has not been a model created yet that effectively resources those cross-project / cross-organization activities. So, while the individual projects are very good at testing their own work, they are not yet fully integrating or interoperating with other open source projects, or even commercial implementations. 

At the Broadband Forum, we see this, even in some of the requests from members to help with the interoperability and integration testing between things such as Linux Foundation Broadband and SDN controllers for the TR-413 interfaces and YANG implementations.

Powering a connected future

By unifying the best of open standards with the latest software developments, BSPs have the tools to deliver a ubiquitous connected home experience. They can empower migration to automated networks with open management and control systems, based on well documented, open, and tested API definitions.

It is critical that the whole broadband ecosystem continues collaborating and working together to develop open standards to ensure they address the global and varying needs of BSPs. Standards development organizations (SDOs) and open source communities must come together to share ideas and develop agile approaches to support future requirements of the connected home network. SDO collaboration brings many benefits as evidenced by the prpl Foundation and Broadband Forum as they set the benchmark where open source software stacks inherently recognize and even embed industry standards in their approach.

By embracing the combined sharing and collaboration that open source principles promise, alongside the efficiency and interoperability of open standards, BSPs have a clear migration pathway and turnkey solutions to deliver an improved user experience.