Broadband Forum Creates an Open Source Project for Network Access Interoperability

The Broadband Forum, which is best known as a standards group, today announced the first code release of its new open source project — Broadband Access Abstraction (BAA).The project aims to facilitate the co-existence of a wide variety of software-defined access technologies within telecommunications networks. It’s bringing openness to access networks so they can interoperate. As a freely-published, open source project, BAA specifies northbound interfaces, core components, and southbound interfaces for functions associated with network access devices that have been virtualized.Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum, said the BAA project is an Apache 2.0 licensed open source project. The code from the project resides on GitHub and contributors develop the work on BitBucket.Operators and equipment manufacturers involved in the project include Broadcom, BT, Calix, CenturyLink, China Telecom, Huawei, Nokia, Telecom Italia, Tibit Communications, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab, and ZTE.