It’s about the subscriber experience: thoughts from the Broadband Forum USP Summit 2024

I’m still reeling from last week’s Broadband Forum Spring member meeting and the 2024 USP/TR-369 Summit. Maybe the best part of my role at QA Cafe is doing this great work to make technology that is really helping people—operators, engineers, developers, and above all, broadband consumers like all of us. But even better are the people I get to work with and meet along the way and the camaraderie and interaction we all share.

That’s the most significant takeaway from last week. I saw people both new and old to the forum, from business to network planning to CPE development, all coming together to learn, talk, and laugh about what we’ve built and are building through the User Services Platform (TR-369) and its comprehensive data model for connected devices (TR-181). It’s humbling to see it grow out of our hands and into the real world, seeing the actual use cases being done right now and all of the great ideas for the future.

Here are some of the key points I think were hit several times over the summit:

Operators are transitioning from TR-069

Opening with Tzvi Skapinker from Friendly Technologies , he set the stage for why transitioning from TR-069 to USP should be done (and why it’s not as hard as you think!) regarding both efficiency and new use cases.

Daniel Egger from Axiros dove right into the different ways to have TR-069 and USP co-exist in deployment. He covered three main cases for this: using TR-069 for legacy use cases, using USP on new devices only, and having both TR-069 and USP running on the same device. If you’ve never met Daniel, he is the project stream leader along with Matthieu Anne from Orange for the entire USP data model work, and his support has been invaluable!

Two major operators gave us full details on how they are using USP in their networks right now. Volker Effelsberg from Deutsche Telekom demonstrated how scalable USP is (the graph of how fast their CPE fleet came back online after an outage was astounding!); but of particular note was how he was using it in conjunction with TR-069 for existing use cases, using USP for home analytics, customer support, and more.

Marcel Sponer from Vodafone showed how they use almost everything USP can do in different capacities: onboarding, support, and application deployment/lifecycle management. This was really cool because they were committed to using it wherever and whenever possible. And, even though the operator had to remain anonymous, I appreciated Isaac Trigo Conde from Incognito Software Systems tell us about their successful deployment of 5G Fixed-Wireless gateways empowered by USP!

Value-added services are a broad topic, but operators want them

One of the things I learned listening to our speakers and roundtable discussions was that value-added services - whether or not containerized applications on the gateway enable them - were what operators were looking for going forward, all easily enabled by USP. The term's breadth was important here: operators are looking to differentiate not just on new services but better support and interaction with customers about their connectivity.

Security and better customer support were definitely top items, with Tom Gaffney of F-Secure Corporation talking about not only the critical need for better security in the home network, but how easy and fast it is to build and deploy those services now with USP and containerized apps. Bj?rn Ivar Teigen Monclair of Domos was clear about exactly how easily an app can be built for network latency management. Troy Cross from Ozmo showed just how powerful and simple customer support can be using USP under the surface.

The architecture for building these new application-enabled broadband services, powered by USP in the home gateway, was the main driver for these conversations. My partner-in-crime through all of this for almost 20 years, John Blackford of Vantiva gave a great overview of how this architecture works and what is coming.

It came up a few times: What will we call this new device that goes far beyond just acting as a router? How will consumers engage with these products and the operators that provide them, compared to how they have in the past as consumer electronics?

Bringing it all together in the real world

I think by far the most engaging parts of the USP Summit were our roundtable discussions. I firmly believe that summits like this should involve the audience as much as possible, and we did our best to keep these sessions conversational rather than canned.

Our operator roundtable included Chen Li of AT&T , Wojtek Makowski of Orange , Arne Schulz of Vodafone , and Volker Effelsberg of DT once again. Our conversation focused once more on the transition from TR-069 to USP, and there were many different views! We also talked a lot about the major challenges of device management now and in the future.

This segued us perfectly into our open-source roundtable, featuring John Blackford, Wojtek Makowski, and Peter Steinhaeuser from embeDD Systems. We hit on the key pillars of successful technology: standards, open-source, and testing. After some humbling praise to QA Cafe and CDRouter for making the testing part easy and accessible, we talked about how necessary it is for standards and open-source to work together, calling out the close work between prpl Foundation and the Broadband Forum, as well as the easy with which operators working with RDK have been able to use USP in their solutions. We also talked about the dangers of using solutions without standards and how many operators are feeling burned by that now. It was also cool to hear how different open-source communities work at a cultural level: you can’t take the people out of the system!

My thanks to everyone who helped

Really, I couldn’t have done this without our presenters stepping up to produce the content, especially Tiffany Groves at the Broadband Forum, who made sure everything went smoothly and did things that I didn’t even know had to be done. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you at the upcoming BBF meetings and anywhere else our paths may cross in the next year.

If there’s anything you loved or would change about our summit, or want to hear about in the future if you weren’t there, please let me know in the comments!

Jason is the Director of Technical Marketing at QA Cafe and host of the Epik Mellon podcast. A protocol geek at heart, he's been involved with technologies like TR-069 since its inception and has spearheaded the creation of the User Services Platform (USP/TR-369) at the Broadband Forum. Jason has more than 20 years of computer networking experience, helping to develop internet and communications technology and translate it into value opportunities for organizations and the industry. Catch him at any event, and he’ll happily talk all things about networking and philosophy over a beer.