Broadband Forum Give ISPs Clearer Guidance on Infrastructure Sharing for Wholesale Use

The Broadband Forum, which is an industry-driven global standards development organisation, has kicked off a new project that aims to equip global broadband ISPs with clearer guidance on sharing network infrastructure for wholesale use – helping to open up more diverse service choices for customers.

The forum’s new Wholesale Access Project (WAP) plans to define service requirements, best practices, and the technical solutions needed to advance wholesale access in broadband networks in an era of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) and cloud networks. The hope is that it will spur technical innovation, efficiency, and automation, while maintaining a consistent high quality of service across the shared infrastructure for existing and new deployments.

“It will outline how access network owners can offer their existing access infrastructure to retail service providers, as well as content, application, and cloud service providers. This approach helps established [broadband ISPs] potentially generate new revenue from their unused network capacity, while giving new providers a faster route to market their services,” said the announcement.

The initiative also addresses wholesale access deployment models applicable to different regulations across the globe. As part of the project, members can collaborate and share insights on their own experiences and advise on the lessons learned and challenges with real-world deployments.

Daniele Franceschini, Head of Technology & Innovation at FiberCop, said:

“As one of Europe’s leading wholesale operators, FiberCop is proud to contribute its expertise in the initiative. Wholesale access has been inherently supported by the Broadband Forum’s network architecture over the past 20 years, and this project takes the best practices from copper‑based broadband to reshape and evolve them for fiber and cloud networks.

The project will identify and define the best innovations, solutions, and practices for Service Providers, covering topics from innovative line testing to domain monitoring, service differentiation, and far-edge computing. Besides serving as co-editor of this new BBF project, FiberCop is coordinating a collaborative team of BBF members committed to contributing on these subjects.”

Daniel Willis, General Manager Advanced Access Technologies at NBN Co, said:

“The project will prove incredibly insightful and help to present opportunities in implementing ‘open’ access within an ecosystem where the network is provided by a wholesale network operator, while the subscriber relationship is owned by a separate retail service provider”.

The work set to be undertaken above sounds similar to what the Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA), which represents many of the UK’s alternative broadband ISP networks, has already been doing with altnets via the Infrastructure Sharing Group (here) and their complementary Wholesale Standards Initiative (WSI) – here.

Suffice to say that the Broadband Forum’s project is probably arriving a bit too late to have much of an impact upon the UK’s market, but you never know. The Forum said that the initiative’s first stage of work will aim to establish a “holistic framework for wholesale service models, use cases, requirements, and best practices“.