Broadband Forum looks to change the broadband wholesale access game

Broadband Forum’s CEO, Craig Thomas, said that the advent of WT-532 reflects the broadband industry’s need to address how buyers and sellers can operate within the new realities of the fiber broadband market.

“The way we've regulated and managed wholesale hasn't changed since the early days of DSL,” he said. “Visibility is a massive problem. How do I solve the finger-pointing issue of the problems?”

Whether it's well-established providers like BT or Australia’s NBN, the key challenge in wholesale broadband access is how one provider’s service differs from another’s.

“We have to solve the differentiation problem,” Thomas said. “You have a model in some countries where the incumbent is also the wholesale operator, and they are selling the same four or five products to everyone else, so the only way they can differentiate sometimes is on price or customer service.”  

Selective wholesale arrangements

While there has been growing momentum around open-access last-mile fiber networks, the reality is that any provider could be a seller on the network.

Initially, a concept mainly seen in Europe and Asian countries, U.S. providers like UTOPIA and now Gigapower are becoming more active. Besides its initial anchor tenant, AT&T, Gigapower signed on Flume last November with a focus on multi-dwelling unit (MDU) connectivity.

From an international standpoint, Europe’s FiberCop and Australia's NBN are key advocates of wholesale fiber broadband access and are supporters of the Broadband Forum's efforts. 

However, with a wholesale arrangement, a service provider has more flexibility to choose which ISPs to partner with.

“My definition of the difference between open access and wholesale will be different from someone else's,” Thomas said. “With open access, you can't limit who you have relationships with, but with wholesale, I think you can be a little bit more selective, and you'll do commercial agreements with who you want.”

If the wholesale broadband market is allowed to proliferate in the U.S., it could put significant downward pressure on broadband prices.

Besides the traditional large telcos, namely AT&T and Verizon, which have been expanding their networks organically and through targeted acquisitions of Lumen’s fiber assets and Frontier, there is a growing crop of competitive providers, such as IQ Fiber, Greenlight Networks, GoNetspeed, and others, that are actively expanding service in new areas.

The question is whether the presence of fiber providers is driving incumbents to adjust their pricing?

Thomas said that while it’s compelling to see new fiber-centric providers shaking up markets with incumbents, prices aren’t coming down dramatically.

“I've always been really interested in and watching the market where new fiber providers are coming into cable territories,” he said. “I'm not seeing much degradation in price, to be honest. Now, if there's an effective wholesale model and you have ten or twenty different ISPs selling that wholesale product, that'll be interesting.”

At the same time, it’s clear that service providers are banking on converged wireless and wireline broadband bundled offerings.

While AT&T, Comcast and Verizon did not break out broadband ARPU, they reported that converged offering rates of wireline broadband and wireless continued to rise during the first quarter.

AT&T’s convergence rate was 42%, while Verizon noted that the integration of Frontier’s fiber into its offerings has been a “major tailwind,” driving 30% lower churn than standalone services.

A similar dynamic was seen at Comcast, where the cable MSO said it was grouping broadband revenue and wireless service revenue into a new convergence revenue view. Comcast’s convergence ARPA, or average revenue per account, currently stands at roughly $85.

All of this makes a wholesale broadband opportunity potentially more attractive in the U.S. market.

“The U.S. is the most attractive broadband market going because the average ARPU for broadband connection is over $50,” Thomas said.

Ensuring secure wholesale

As more broadband wholesale models proliferate, the need for secure connections will be even more critical.

The Broadband Forum’s Wholesale Access Project establishes standardized best practices and security frameworks across Layer 1, Layer 2, and Layer 3 networks, addressing the operational, performance, and security gaps in shared infrastructure.

It will provide security and control at every peering point, maintaining privacy and isolation in multi-tenant wholesale environments. Like wholesale arrangements service providers make when they go out of region to serve a business customer via network to network interface (NNI) agreements, the Broadband Forum wholesale project creates a framework to track Service Level Agreements (SLAs) without compromising network security. 

“You've heard the horror stories of how many networks have themselves been attacked, and in the wholesale model, you've got more peering points than any other,” Thomas said. “So, how do I make sure I secure each peering point? And the weakest link doesn't bring me down?”

He added that even if a small ISP begins tomorrow,  they will “have the same access rights into a wholesale network as the big guys that have big security protection.”

Enabling sustainability

In tandem with security and QoS, Broadband Forum is assisting the vendor and provider community in their efforts to achieve environmental sustainability, particularly around optimizing energy use, reducing power consumption, and extending the lifespan of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE).

It is aligning network technologies with sustainability objectives by optimizing energy use, reducing power consumption, and extending the lifespan of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) to build environmentally responsible broadband ecosystems. 

The latest extensions embedded in the Broadband Forum’s TR-181 Issue 2 Amendment 20 Data Model will enable broadband service providers (BSPs) and manufacturers to design and introduce even smarter, more environmentally friendly products, while maintaining performance.

When used over a User Services Platform (USP/TR-369)-enabled network, the effort introduces standard mechanisms for controlling and monitoring power consumption of embedded network technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB, xPON, and Thread. Also, the TR-181 device data model allows BSPs to manage connected devices and ensures interoperability between devices and management software from different vendors.

“A lot of the operators are getting carbon footprint targets and are asking how to manage that,” Thomas said. “The question is, how do I prove between multiple operators how effective and sustainable the network is?”

In other instances, there are markets where a provider wants to keep the device in the home as two separate boxes: an ONT and the home gateway.

However, Thomas noted that providers in other markets would say that a two-box construct is inefficient. Still, a device would need to allow the wholesale provider access to Layers 1 and 2, and the retail provider access to Layers 3 and above, to offer services and IP addressing.

“Two things are taking up energy,” Thomas said. “Is there a way that I can virtually securely separate the two devices and just make it one box?”

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