Vodafone and partners trial new broadband standard

Vodafone, together with Benu Networks, Casa Systems, Cisco, and Nokia, have successfully tested a system that will make it quicker and easier to deliver faster fixed broadband services to new and existing customers across Europe.

The test used control and user plane separation (CUPS) defined by both the Broadband Forum and the 3GPP. It was conducted between test labs in Belgium (Nokia), Ireland (Casa Systems), India (Cisco) and the United States (Benu Networks).

This architecture and the interoperability testing performed allows the core control functions of the gateway, such as authenticating a user and increasing bandwidth to be separated and managed in the cloud, while ensuring multi-vendor interoperability.

Johan Wibergh, Chief Technology Officer for Vodafone, said: “We are already driving a more diverse and open mobile ecosystem with Open RAN, and now we are targeting fixed broadband. As an industry, and with government support, we owe it to people with no or slow internet access to quicken the rollout of new capabilities on fast, fixed broadband.”

“We applaud Vodafone for taking a strong industry leadership role by driving standards-based interoperability between vendors,” said Ajay Manuja, CTO and VP of engineering at Benu Networks.

“Benu has specifically designed our cloud-native, disaggregated SD-Edge platform to be an open system for BNG and 5G convergence, supporting over 25 million broadband-connected homes and businesses.”

Benu is proud to have participated in this multi-vendor test and is committed to continued advancements in the development and delivery of cloud-native solutions for service providers to provide them the service agility, flexibility, and scale they need to compete.