Toward an App Store on the CPE
Magnus Olden
CTO, Domos. Top 50 most influential in Broadband/Telecom (Awarded by Informa Tech). Coauthor QoO framework
Kaon, Incognito and Domos - A story of standards and innovation
Stop me if you’ve heard this one…A new General Purpose Technology emerges, but its stewards fail through a long, arduous journey to move it to its rightful destination. This is the story of the broadband industry, where complex processes and an apparent fear of the unknown self-stifles the industry into a pace of innovation best described as glacial (pre-climate change, of course).
How can the industry at last break out of the blocks of stagnation?
Though citing Apple founder Steve Jobs is a bit of a cliche, there’s no better model for driving innovation and monetization than his iPhone, the birthplace of the App Store. And it was innovation pure and simple. Apple was no where near the powerhouse it is today, but its second act success was a direct result of the bet it made with the iPhone and App Store - a winning trifecta that openly promotes innovation, monetization and customer retention in one fell swoop. While industries of all stripes can look to the App Store for inspiration, we would argue that there is no better application of that winning model than the broadband industry, ISPs and that nascent platform, the humble CPE.
To get there, let’s look at the App Store and how its logic can be applied in the context of carrier-delivered services on a CPE. Creating try-able, buy-able apps on the home gateway, which we have done, certainly aligns well to the Apple model. So what’s the recipe that would make that process fluid and open. What does Apple’s App store do?
It handles:
If all of this sounds much easier said than done, you are right. We’ve spent years working with our partners Incognito, Kaon Broadband and others on making it possible. Certainly, any ISP would love to make the CPE a monetizable platform for 3rd party Apps, but before going into the “How To” of doing it, an important note about “How Not To”.
Anyone in the broadband industry who’s watched the meteoric rise of the iPhone over the past dozen years has been painfully aware that it has left left CSPs quite empty-handed.?Now the de facto standard for all devices, iOS, Android alike, the “Apple effect” has dusted the industry, leaving them scrambling to re?stablish relevancy as something more than a dumb pipe in a sea of great OTT content and services.
To ensure that this well-known history does not repeat itself, CSPs should be very worried about an Apple-style company owning the App store on the CPE. It would undoubtedly result in that company getting the lion's share of the profit and an extremely difficult to break vendor lock-in.?The only way to ensure that doesn’t happen, is by fully embracing an open standards-based, vendor agnostic approach that will support any apps on any device over any network.
The great news for CSPs is that that day has finally arrived. At the most recent Broadband World Forum, we were pleased to demonstrate the industry’s very first commercially deployed open-standards based App Store on a CPE with Kaon Broadband and Incognito. The deployment at once provides a blueprint for service providers everywhere and a rousing endorsement of the visionary work of the standards bodies involved in making it possible.
Let’s take a look at how those open-standards and technologies come into play in satisfying the requirements of an App Store on the CPE, following the Apple recipe.
OpenWrt?is a full-blown Linux operating system for the CPE that in no better words than theirs, provides “a single, static, fully writable filesystem with package management. For developers, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.”
In the parlance of Apple, this becomes the iOS for the CPE.
领英推荐
#1 A Unified Development Platform? CHECK!
Linux Containers (LXC), as its name suggests, allows us to contain or sandbox CPE applications for testing and managing permissions. In their words “it provides a vendor neutral environment” for “containers and virtual machines that run full Linux systems,” to simulate any software or hardware environment , and at much lower cost than COTS VMs.
LXC Containers thus satisfy requirement #2 in our App Store on the CPE recipe
#2 Sandboxing & Permissions? CHECK!
Hands down, the Broadband Forum?has done more than any organization to make the next generation, fully-enabled CPE a reality. Without going into the nitty-gritty of various evolutionary steps in larger User Services Platform (USP) umbrella, two standards comes into play in enabling the final two App Store on the CPE recipe items required.
To quote CableLabs?who have been central in extending it with Data Elements, “TR-181 is device data model that encompasses a variety of CPE configuration and monitoring parameters.” This implies a great deal of flexibility in how it is deployed. In our blueprint, TR-181 provides an essential framework and tool kit for remote management, configuration and troubleshooting for the elements deployed on the CPE. In essence, in this capacity ,it provides a set of customizable instructions for how an app behaves once it is live on the CPE.
In this way, the Broadband Forum’s USP standard TR-181 provides the access and mechanisms required to satisfy App store recipe item #3
#3 Versioning, Compatibility, Deployment, (Un)Installation & Upgrades? CHECK!
User Services Platform USP (TR-369)?has a standardized way of remotely Deploying and managing a container.?In the case of our live prototype, Incognito leverages its cloud based USP controller with OSS/BSS integration to handle versioning, accounting, and legal.?
The pair can remove nearly all the friction for innovators and the ISP to create an App Store. The Apps will work perfectly on Kaon CPEs (or anyone else using the standards), and with Incognito’s App Store (or anyone else using the standards).
#4 Customer-App relationship? CHECK!
Barriers to Innovation, Removed…
Companies like Domos or internal ISP innovators can spend R&D resources on true innovation. But most critically these new services don’t need to take months or years to deploy and monetize as they have in the past. This blueprint means new innovations don’t mean yet another integration process, yet another legal process, yet more QA and testing process, yet further risk assessments, and so on. The fully virtualized, SDN/NFV capabilities that CSPs have invested in, precisely to avoid these long launch cycles are here, and can be switched on in a matter of weeks, if not days.
However a given CSP wishes to deploy their new App Store on the CPE, there’s no better time than now to begin the work of developing branded subscriber experiences and testing them across any number of high value business cases, segments and micro-segments within Gaming, Work From home or long tail, Bespoke Tailored Home Network applications.
Domos and our amazing partners are here to help.
PS. This blog is also available at https://www.domos.no/news-updates/toward-an-app-store-ion-the-cpe
Executive Head of Products and Head of EU RnD @ KAON | Electrical Engineering MSc
1 年Thanks Magnus for the article! Partnerships are the key for the change on the CPE business model as we know it! Happy to share the technology leadership with this amazing team! The CPE APP Store is not just a concept or framework!It's a reality today! It's a way to deliver new added values to end consumers by just making their live easier with a touch of a button!