ATIS OANF forum addresses the North American open-access fiber opportunity

Susan Miller, president and CEO of ATIS, said that OANF will drive consistency for North American providers designing and operating open access networks to simplify service enablement and create a profit machine for broadband providers.

“If this effort is done right, it could create new revenue opportunities, and that's really the bottom line of open access,” she said. “It's a very innovative approach, and to be able to open up new revenue is key to the landscape here.”

One notable aspect of OANF is that Chair Scott Baker, Corporate ServiceNow Platform Architecture at AT&T Technology Services, and Vice Chair Sajan Parikh, CTO at COS Systems, lead it.

Initially touted by community-led providers, UTOPIA, the open-access concept has gained greater popularity after AT&T launched its Gigapower initiative with private investor BlackRock.

Gigapower offers a fiber-based, multi-gigabit, wholesale broadband transport service to Internet Service Providers, as well as point-to-point Ethernet and Dark Fiber to businesses.

Being an early adopter of the open-access model in North America, Baker said ATIS can help drive broader adoption and stronger interoperability across the ecosystem.

“OANF is about lowering the barriers to making the open access model work, right? The more we can standardize this, the more we can ensure that, before we ever engage between an ISP and an open access provider (OAP), we're all talking the same language: our IT systems can talk the same things. We’re aligned on what the standard interconnects would look like.”

He added that “we take out so much time trying to figure out how to build and the cost required to build those enterprise-to-enterprise relationships, and that results in our ability to make more deals with more OAPs to provide more fiber access to more parts of the country.”

Parikh said that broadband “in North America it's kind of a turning point” that could make open access a more compelling idea.

“In North America, it’s a turning point with a lot of the mergers and acquisitions that are happening,” he said. “Open access used just to be like, hey, we're doing something new, so do we want to do open access or not, and that didn’t always make sense for the business case.”

He added that what has changed “is when you get into this high stakes merger and acquisition space happening right now, open access takes on a different picture in that you buy a network that all of a sudden shared resources and shared infrastructure become a much easier next line to draw versus a whole new project in North America that was a little unattractive before.”  

Baker agreed that open access can enable broadband operators to rapidly expand their networks to more locations.

“If our goal is to expand the number of homes that we can deliver our fiber products to, open access is a natural fit into that,” he said. “It's a way for us to get into markets we may otherwise have a presence in today and to more quickly expand our reach with our products and services across America without necessarily having always to build it ourselves.”

Despite the potential for open access, the concept, outside of a few providers like UTOPIA and, more recently, Gigapower, has not been a major phenomenon in North America. Other examples include Wired Road in Virginia, which has quickly attracted both local and regional service providers. 

However, several countries in Europe and Asia, including Australia, Singapore, and Sweden, have been more aggressive with open access through collaboration with government entities that have set broadband expansion mandates.

What makes North America different from other countries is the nature of network construction. Service providers often operate in a geography where home locations are more geographically dispersed, particularly in rural areas.

“One of the biggest things in North America is just very simply the distances. It's much bigger than Europe, so the economics of deploying fiber are different,” Baker said. “You don't have nearly the amount of overbuild that you might have in somewhere like the UK.”

Parikh agreed and added that not only are the densities making it harder to capture market capital investment. Unlike other countries, such as Sweden and Korea, which have public funding mechanisms, the United States requires a higher level of capital investment.

“The business cases and the way that people are justifying some of these open access projects are just very different from those in Sweden or Korea, where open access is thriving,” he said. “In these countries, it’s pretty easy for there to be government mandates that we want X amount of penetration, it's got to be fiber, with these standards so that those companies can justify that capital easily.”

He added that in the United States, there’s a requirement to have the “ISP first, the penetration rate guarantee, and that drives different commercial arrangements, which drives operational arrangements, which then drives a lot of technical realities as well that are vastly different.”

Driving industry collaboration, interoperability

What drove ATIS and the members of this group to conceive the Open Access Network Forum was that there are already specifications, but they don't go far enough, and certainly don't address this market.

Baker said that ATIS is aiming to bridge the gap that reduces the time to onboarding an Open Access Provider (OAP) to an ISP relationship and lowers costs.

“We need to ensure these systems and these networks are interoperable from day one,” he said. “If they follow the playbook that the TM Forum is tasked to go out and build, then we know that yes, they're using underlying TM Forum standards and other standards. We're filling the gap in between where those standards leave off and what you need to get to be truly interoperable.”

Although interoperability standards exist, open access in North America has unique operational influences that other groups have not addressed.

As a telecom standards group with AT&T as a major member, ATIS is keen to collaborate with other organizations, such as the TM Forum, which has launched its own open-access effort, the Wholesale Broadband project. This project is working on how to standardize the process of selling, buying, and managing wholesale products, initially in the context of fiber-specific use cases.

The goal of that project is to create business processes and technical engineering (APIs related to the journeys for each business use case). It will also standardize and harmonize the solution for a country-agnostic approach by introducing common business scenarios and APIs with a fiber-related product payload on a NetCo platform. 

While AT&T and other U.S.-based operators have been members of groups like the TM Forum’s wholesale broadband working group, which is kind of the international version of similar discussions, Baker emphasized that ATIS can help address issues specific to North American open-access fiber broadband markets.

“There are ways that we do business in North America that are different than the way the business is done in Europe,” he said. “We need to make sure that we understand not just, you know, what does a low-level API payload look like, but also how that reflects itself in our business processes and how we interact with one another in the market?”

Striving for commonality

An open access network typically consists of three layers or stages: the passive infrastructure, the active component, and the services offered.

While enabling new ways to create and build fiber networks is key to driving FTTH, ATIS’ goal with OANF is to create an interoperability playbook for players.

Interest in OANF remains high. ATIS has not yet named specific companies, but it has 35 individuals representing more than 20 companies.  

These interfaces would include all interface points, including network interfaces, process interfaces, and the IT interfaces between the open access host provider and the ISP, and not necessarily the transport network or the access network that exists within.

Baker said ATIS’ vision is to have interfaces that can “provide a playbook for interoperability” between the network and process interfaces, but not the access and transport networks.

“The focus is on providing a playbook for interoperability of these entities, irrespective of whether that access network is a fiber PON network, a cable network, or a wireless network,” he said. “The same kinds of interfaces can be made to be agnostic to that particular access technology, so the focus becomes on what the process is, what the use cases are we have to solve for, and what the process flow for customers looks like, so we can deliver services to our customers.”

However, one fundamental challenge in North America exists: most broadband consumers aren’t aware of open access. “One of the things that's interesting and different in the American market versus Europe,” Baker said. “The customers are generally unaware that the open access provider exists. They're dealing directly with their ISP and are aware that their ISP is the one who's providing their product.”

He added that “final mile connectivity that they're getting from the OAP is not necessarily visible to them as an end customer, nor should they really have to care, and it should just work.”

This work will help drive home the idea that an ecosystem supported by vendors and service providers of all sizes can foster commonality, thereby broadening the market for open-access networks.

Parikh emphasized that ISPs of all sizes and their vendor partners can benefit.  

“I hope what we put is adoptable by not only the larger vendors and larger kind of Tier 1, Tier 2s, but also the smaller ISPs as well,” Parikh said. “Because if you think like 10-15 years down the road, open access really only succeeds when you have an ecosystem of thriving market base of many ISPs and sometimes these standards can be a barrier to that as well.”

As the CTO of COS Systems, which has led several open-access initiatives, Parikh noted that many of the organizations it works with have expressed interest in common standards. Today, several ISPs operate on multiple networks that must undergo different integration procedures with the underlying carrier.

“A lot of them are saying if we can standardize this irrespective of the OAP's operational models, which sometimes changes the integration flow as well, that would make it easier for them just to turn on and be an ISP anywhere,” he said.

For related articles, visit the Broadband Topic Center.
For more information on high-speed transmission systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer’s Guide.
To stay abreast of fiber network deployments, subscribe to Lightwave’s Service Providers and Datacom/Data Center newsletters