Broadband Forum CEO: ISPs are paving a path to 'Connectivity+'

Amid slowing broadband subscriber growth, service providers are exploring ways to drive up overall revenues alongside average revenues per user with new services and applications. Some operators are pursuing that with premium whole-home Wi-Fi offerings, low-latency gaming tiers and home security or bundling in streaming services that take advantage of the high data speeds. Support of such strategies and initiatives is of growing importance at the Broadband Forum, an organization that works with standards that support the end-to-end broadband ecosystem. Broadband operators have largely solved the core connection issue, so they are now pushing ahead with "services-led broadband" or "connectivity+" strategies, said Broadband Forum CEO Craig Thomas. He said open source platforms such as Prpl and the Reference Design Kit (RDK) are playing a critical role in achieving that by extracting the software platform from the hardware and giving service providers a way to experiment with and rapidly deploy new services and applications. These open source platforms also provide operators with the foundation to create new types of service bundles that ride the broadband operator's primary broadband connection.