Isaac Trigo
Emerging technologies have sparked a fresh wave of innovation within the broadband industry, and at the forefront is the User Services Platform (USP) TR-369 and its comprehensive data model for connected devices (TR-181). This technology, set to redefine how service providers interact with home devices and gateways, is gaining momentum and shaping the future landscape of the broadband ecosystem. During the 2024 USP Summit, industry experts came together to dive deeper into trends and showcase how TR-369 enhances customer experiences.
As a gold sponsor of this year's event, the team had the opportunity to participate fully in an action-packed summit hosted by the Broadband Forum event in Germany. The summit featured key plenary sessions, interactive roundtables, and live demonstrations. On the first day of the event, the Incognito team had the opportunity to give a joint demo alongside our partner KAON, showcasing how KAON's TR-369-enabled CPE and Incognito's USP controller work together for service orchestration in the connected home, creating new revenues and agile operations in the consumer fixed segment, all while putting industry standards into action.
On the second day, we participated in a roundtable session, during which we shared insights into our successful USP deployment at a Tier 1 service provider for 5G fixed wireless gateways and real-world use cases.
While chatting and watching presentations from operators, partners, and other vendors in this space, a few key themes stood out...
Convergence of Standards Within the Connected Home
Fantastic industry collaboration is happening within the broadband community, especially between the PRPL Foundation, Broadband Forum, and RDK. Through the development of open APIs and standardization, leveraging USP as its backbone, these organizations are working towards enhancing home gateway architecture, enabling service providers to deploy, activate, and manage third-party applications and services with greater ease. When we have open APIs and technologies, everyone wins with reduced IT integration costs by avoiding proprietary interfaces, eliminating technology siloes and rolling out new devices and features and higher ARPU products to consumers and businesses faster.
Apps and Containerization
Though security and Wi-Fi optimization are trending USP use cases, we're beginning to see more interest in Matter, an open-source connectivity standard for smart home and IoT devices aiming to improve interoperability between different manufacturers, with the goal of unifying management and control of consumer IoT and the disparate IoT protocols within the home environment, that span differing consumer verticals. This raises the need for a holistic approach to lifecycle management for app and device orchestration to simplify service delivery while providing subscribers with a seamless experience. For service providers, this is critical to building additional revenues in the B2C segment and shortening the team to market for compelling new offers.
Hybrid Architectures
The majority of presentations given by operators during the event highlighted an approach to USP adoption with a co-existence mentality – keep ACS TR-069 in place steady-state and implement USP in parallel with new products/offers that leverage TR-369 capabilities. For operators that want to benefit from USP now, minimizing operational impacts for the connected home and avoiding re-inventing the wheel is a sound architecture strategy that also eases the long-term transition to USP (the TR-181 data model being backwards compatible also helps).
Telemetry and Analytics
While device analytics has been talked about at previous USP Summits, in 2024, there was a bigger emphasis on big data, network APIs, and AI. These discussions spanned network monitoring scenarios and augmenting call center operations to speed triage of customer issues and improve SLA adherence. The use cases of particular interest were around combining in-home data, network APIs, and end-to-end orchestration to help open new ecosystem opportunities for service providers and enhance the subscriber quality of the experience.
What's Next?
If any of the themes resonate with you, be sure to tune into the Broadband Forum webinar sponsored by Incognito on March 26th at 10:00 AM EST. The webinar will delve into key findings from the latest Future of the Connected Home survey and our perspectives on the tools service providers need to meet the growing demands of the connected home and how they can deliver new value-added services. Register for a free seat now.
If you are a service provider or hardware/software vendor testing the waters with USP, we would love to chat. Reach out to learn more about Incognito's User Services Platform solution, which supports prpl and RDK. Our team would love to share how we've helped operators and industry partners with service orchestration, container integration, telemetry and more! Click here to request a meeting, or join us at the upcoming FTTH Conference event in Germany.
We look forward to next year's USP Summit!
Submit a Comment