USP Summit 2024 and the future of the managed connected home

I'm here getting really excited (and exhausted!) while preparing for the upcoming Spring Broadband Forum meeting during the week of March 4th in Mainz, Germany. What's cool about this particular meetings is that the BBF has a packed schedule not just for technical standards work, but also a Town Hall session on AI in networks and security (on Monday), plus the annual Broadband Access Seminar (BASe) Technical Summit and the 2024 User Services Platform (USP) Summit. The best part is, you can go to all of it for a single registration!

I want to talk about the USP Summit. We had a very successful summit last year, with an amazing operator roundtable featuring Stephen Kelly , Mark Kopec , óscar Leal , and Volker Effelsberg . This year, the summit will be entirely in person, so we have a lot more time over two days to cover many topics (see the agenda below).

The growth of USP since its launch in 2018 has been exciting and humbling. As I've mention on the Epik Mellon Podcast many times, it's very cool to see the things you've built and created with your colleagues improving the lives of broadband users (and the operators supporting them) in real time. In the most recent OMDIA report from the Broadband Forum (a survey of 111 operators from around the world), the growth of USP is clear:

You read that right: 84% of operators surveyed will have USP managing their subscriber home networks in the next year or so. That's incredible.

So, we expect the 2024 USP Summit to be great for educating future users of the protocol, give some real world deployment stories from real operators, and include talk of how the open-source community (through prpl Foundation , RDK , and more) is not only making this rapid deployment possible, but paving the way for USP's use as the "holy grail" of networking standards: an open platform for deploying applications on broadband CPE ( Evgueni Tzvetanov and I chat about this on the latest Epik Mellon here).

There's still time to register and join us in Mainz! Volker Effelsberg will return for a full presentation on how Deutsche Telekom has scaled up to the next order of magnitude of managed devices with USP. Marcel Sponer is going to talk about how USP is driving Vodafone 's service strategy (and their partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) ). This plus a full operator roundtable featuring DT, AT&T, Vodafone, and Orange, a roundtable of open-source solutions, and some in-depth training on how to get the most out of USP and TR-181, is making for a great lineup. Here's the full agenda:

Thanks to all of our speakers, including Daniel Egger from Axiros , John Blackford from Vantiva , Tzvi Skapinker of Friendly Technologies , Matthieu Anne from Orange , Tim Spets from 诺基亚 , Troy Cross from Ozmo , Tom Gaffney from F-Secure Corporation , Magnus Olden from Domos , Isaac Trigo Conde from Incognito Software Systems , Arne Schulz at Vodafone , Volker Effelsberg of Deutsche Telekom , Chen Li at AT&T, Jose Ramon Diaz Martinez from RDK , Peter Steinhaeuser from embeDD, and of course Wojtek Makowski from Orange !

There's still time to register, I hope to see you there.