Broadband Forum, ON.Lab partner on CORD development

The Broadband Forum announced a Memorandum of Understanding with the Open Networking Laboratory (ON.Lab), with the aim of accelerating the development of future broadband requirements and standards in close collaboration with open source projects. The agreement formalizes and extends the collaboration between Broadband Forum and ON.Lab which began during the build-up to the Forum’s recent special meeting on broadband network evolution in Atlanta. 

The terms of the MOU will enable the CORD Project community to understand the requirements of next-generation broadband services at the Forum and demonstrate how these can be met with the CORD platform. The work of the community will in turn inform future Broadband Forum standards based on real-world open source implementations and speed up the time-to-market of solutions for providers and vendors, the group said. 

The emergence of the Cloud Central Office (CO) was one of the key discussion points of the Atlanta meeting, with ON.Lab holding demonstrations and presentations of the CORD project. CORD, or Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center, integrates NFV and SDN to bring data centre economics and cloud flexibility to the central office and access network.