Broadband Forum Launches BroadbandSuite™ 6.2 Establishing a New Standard for G-PON Network Interoperability

FREMONT, Calif., June 18, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Broadband Forum today released BroadbandSuite 6.2, which establishes a fiber interoperability test plan and offers new options to accelerate G-PON deployments within the broadband industry. This comes at a time when fiber is the fastest growing access technology around the globe, and offers global new verification tools to simplify equipment selection and better keep up with intense market demands for stable and high speed broadband networks.

BroadbandSuite 6.2 builds on the Forum's BBF.247 ONU Certification Program which is widely endorsed by major network operators deploying G-PON across the world and responds to the industry's need for interoperability to help speed the widespread adoption of fiber based networks. It assures that G-PON equipment meets service provider requirements for efficient network operations and high quality broadband access options.

"Service providers need world class, market-ready ONUs and network interoperability," said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum. "To reduce the cost of fiber rollouts, providers want standards-verified fiber products. With a reliable certification program, testing burdens decrease, and more vendors can ship interoperable products, which means a reduced time to market."

BroadbandSuite 6.2 is a vital resource of global test plans, including the rigorous BBF.247 and the new OLT/ONU interoperability test suite. BBF.247 verifies the conformance of G-PON ONU devices to the ITU-T G.998 G-PON standard and to the Broadband Forum TR-156 specifications. With this new release, the BBF.247 test plan now offers new options for verifying ONUs against multiple VLAN profiles and functionality tests. 

This release also includes two pending technical reports:  a new test plan for XG-PON1 (WT-309), as well as a new PON Optical Layer management report (WT-287).  WT-287 looks at how to optimize a multi-service PON network catering to both business and residential customers.  It covers system architecture, use cases, functional requirements and interoperability requirements. The specifications in WT-287 apply to both ITU-T and IEEE PON systems.

The BroadbandSuite 6.2 release includes:
IR-247:          GPON ONU Conformance Test Plan (detailed version, available to members only)
ATP-247:       Abstract GPON ONU Conformance Test Plan (summary of IR-247, publicly available)
TR-255:         G-PON Interoperability Test Plan
WT-309:        XG-PON1 Physical layer Interoperability Test Plan (in final development)
WT-287:        PON Optical Layer Management (in final development)

Additional fiber-related work in development at the Broadband Forum:

• ONU deployment requirements for XG-PON1
• Fiber to the Distribution Point (FTTdp) requirements and architecture work

The latest company with a product to successfully pass BBF.247 issue 2 is Lantiq, a leading supplier of broadband access and home networking technologies. Dirk Wieberneit, Lantiq Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) Business Unit, commented on the milestone: "The continued expansion of fiber networks worldwide and the accelerating transition from EPON to GPON to provide better performance and QoS is backed by the standards certification of the Broadband Forum. We are extremely proud to offer cutting edge GPON solutions with our FALC™ ON GPON System on Chip, which is fully compliant with the BBF.247 ONU certification, to enable our customers to maintain their technology leadership in the high growth market of FTTx deployments."

Commenting further, Mersh added: "This expanded Broadband Forum G-PON Certification Program provides the breakthrough step to accelerate deployment now, and to create an interoperable platform for future-proof development in new fiber networks."

The Broadband Forum has approved an independent testing laboratory to conduct BBF.247 ONU certification.  The approved lab is LAN Laboratories, based in France and China.

For more information about the Broadband Forum and its work in this area, please go to www.broadband-forum.org. To view the global list of G-PON ONU certified products, go to http://www.broadband-forum.org/certifiedgpon.php.

For further information please contact Brian Dolby on +44 (0) 7899 914168 or Dana Corson on +44 (0) 1636 812152 or send an email to [email protected] or [email protected].

About the Broadband Forum
Broadband Forum, a non-profit industry organization, is focused on engineering smarter and faster broadband networks. Our work defines best practices for global networks, enables service and content delivery, establishes technology migration strategies, engineers critical device & service management tools, and is key to redefining broadband. Our free technical reports and white papers can be found at www.broadband-forum.org.

SOURCE Broadband Forum