The Broadband Forum and SDN/NFV Industry have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to jointly establish an Open Broadband Laboratory Asia (OBLA) and promote the development of network transformation and cloud evolution at the recent China SDN/NFV Conference in Beijing.

Open Broadband Labs are a collaborative resource for the integration, staging and testing of open source, commercial software, standards-based and vendor implementations where suppliers, integrators and operators can work together on new and coexisting solutions.

Under the agreement, the Forum will authorise SDN/NFV Industry Alliance to construct OBLA in China and conduct conformance and interoperability testing, migration best practices, technical due diligence and training around the project. OBLA will be built and managed by the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance, while the Broadband Forum will provide technical direction, testing methods, a standards framework and domain expertise.

The OBLA builds on the Forum’s ongoing and completed virtualisation and cloud projects, including the Network Enhanced Residential Gateway, which shifts functionalities from the Residential Gateway to the operator’s network, Cloud Central Office, Fixed Access Network Sharing, SDN in the Access Network, and the virtual Business Gateway.

Wei Leping, president of the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance, and China Telecom Beijing Research Institute, said: “The lack of standards and a unified framework for Network Cloud and SDN is a significant problem, which leads to fragmentation in the industry and defeats interoperability, slowing the industry’s development.

“As one of the most important organisations in broadband, the Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband Lab can be the unified and standardised platform to address the fragmentation issues and resolve the problems the industry is facing.”