TelcoTV: DSL Forum restructures spec releases

ATLANTA--The DSL Forum, a group that has grown beyond its DSL roots into broadband deployment, today unwrapped a new structure for its work and a Release 2.0 version of its industry benchmarks and milestones.

The new structure divides that work into three buckets: Release 1.0, the legacy work around high-speed access; Release 2.0, the current work-in-progress concerning the control, access and home network pieces of triple play access via ADSL 2+; and Release 3.0, a future project which adds functionality for advanced services and includes VDSL and GPON deployments.

“This is a more formalized release plan that will make it easier for the industry to identify what specifications apply to which areas of deployment,” said George Dobrowski, president and chairman of the DSL Forum. “We have tried to package our technical requirements into logical solutions, with a common language.”

In addition, for the first time, the DSL Forum is laying out a roadmap of its future work that includes technical recommendations (TRs), working texts and proposed documents, some of which will never be published outside the membership.

The new release structure is intended to be a toolkit for service providers, so they can simplify the request for proposal process and know exactly what benchmarks they need vendors to hit. It is also expected to aid vendors in the benchmarking of their products and in creating a common language with which they can describe sometimes-complex systems for sales purposes.

Dobrowski said the new nomenclature will aid the forum in its communications with other groups, such as standards bodies, and in its conversations with the media and analysts.

BroadbandSuite Release 2.0, announced today, includes existing TRs for Ethernet-centric multicast-capable architectures, performance testing, interoperability test plans, broadband residential gateways, element management to network management communications and management of next-generation DSL.

It includes amendments to TR-69, the Forum’s much-used requirement for wide area network customer premises equipment management, and to TRs for functions such as Internet gateway models and data models.

BroadbandSuite Release 3.0 will encompass VDSL and GPON and include newer functionality such as the ability to monitor and control set-top boxes and other devices that lie beyond the home gateway, Dobrowski said.