The Broadband Forum on Tuesday during this year's Broadband World Forum event unveiled its new certification program, BBF.069, to certify that broadband CPE adheres to the forum's TR-69 network management specification.
Broadcom, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), D-Link, Huawei and Lantiq all achieved BBF.069 certifications at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) testing lab.
This certification program was developed to verify if devices are TR-69 compliant.
With its roots in the DSL world, TR-69, also known as CPE WAN Management Protocol, is the remote management standard used to provision and manage devices in the home. To date, TR-69 is used by service providers to manage over 147 million devices.
Given the competitive nature of the CPE market segment, one of the obvious benefits about being certified is that each vendor's CPE gear will be able to interoperate with their service provider customer's Auto-Configuration Servers (ACS).
One service provider that sees the value in the program is CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), an ILEC that's been expanding its broadband data and IPTV service presence in the markets it serves.
"This certification program is a great step forward in helping service providers like us rollout new products and services with great confidence and success, knowing that they are certified and will be easily provisioned and managed by CenturyLink," said Michael Fargano, Industry Standards program manager at CenturyLink's Office of the CTO, in a release about the new program.
The Broadband Forum's move to work with the UNH-IOL is not that surprising since the university lab has been testing TR-69 since 2006. UNH-IOL is also offering TR-69 certification testing via the Home Networking Consortium it launched in June.
For more:
- see the release
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