Standards are key to simplifying wholesale broadband worldwide

At the end of March, Norway’s telecoms regulator, Nkom, instead of regulating wholesale broadband, recommended the country’s operators move to a voluntary system of opening access to their fiber networks to ensure a functioning market. It is not the only country that is evaluating how to create more open and flexible fiber broadband markets. The German telecoms industry is currently deep in discussions about how to structure future wholesale fiber access amid national network build-out.

Standards will play an important role in supporting new wholesale models, wherever the location. For this reason, TM Forum members are collaborating within a TM Forum Catalyst to develop Open APIs and data models to facilitate interoperability between service providers and wholesale access providers. The first Catalyst, Wholesale Fiber broadband standardization: Simplifying the sale of broadband products using standard process data models and APIs focused last year on standardizing the wholesale broadband product model. This year’s Catalyst, Broadband as a service: The future of wholesale broadband ordering phase II, which will be present at TM Forum’s DTW event in Copenhagen, focuses on the service model. Communications service provider (CSP) participants in the Catalyst include AT&T, BT, Cityfibre, Deutsche Glasfiber, Deutsche Telekom, Lyse and Vodafone.

Inform caught up with two of the Catalyst members, Karsten Thon, Wholesale Business Architect, Program-Management Wholesale Interfaces at Deutsche Telekom, and Egil Risvoll Sørensen, Vice President IT Wholesale at Lyse Tele in Norway. Their companies are both members of TM Forum’s wholesale broadband project, which aims to standardize the process of selling, buying and managing wholesale products. Thon and Sørensen discussed the different ways they are using TM Forum APIs and models to simplify wholesale service delivery and improve customer experience in their respective home countries of Germany and Norway.

‘It’s crucial to have standardization’

One of the biggest surprises for Sørensen when he joined the project “was how similar we all are in our requirements and in the process” even though business models and markets can vary greatly.

In Norway, for example, more than 100 network operators serve approximately 5.5 million consumers. A major player in the Norwegian market, Lyse is a communications and energy company that delivers broadband and entertainment services under the brand Altibox to dozens of fiber companies. It also owns a mobile operator, Ice. Lyse joined the broadband project and the Catalysts because of the need to standardize an emerging fiber marketplace in Norway.

“To have an open market that actually functions [with] over 100 different network operators, that all open networks in their own way, with their own process, with their own APIs, it's quite easy to see that the complexity for an ISP would be exponential,” says Sørensen. “No one would be making any money at all in a model like that. So, for us, it's crucial to have standardization.”

Lyse will use Open APIs to underpin its greenfield fiber broadband marketplace. When an ISP queries the marketplace, for example, the request will be automatically relayed to participating network operators, including those with which Lyse partners through Altibox.

“Wholesale is a margins game, so we need efficient processes, otherwise we lose money on every access we sell,” explains Sørensen. “We're in the process of designing the requirements for the marketplace, and the work we're doing here [in the Catalyst] is paramount to that.”

Simplicity and efficiency are key to Lyse’s business model.

“We don't see it as being very functionality heavy. It’s more about enforcing the standard for the access party,” says Sørensen. “They have one place to have an address search, one place to do the offer qualification and then get result back from all the network operators they have access contracts with.” The marketplace then ensures both sides are using the correct APIs to accurately and automatically exchange order information.

Scale, however, will be key. “It's a necessity for us to ensure that we get the traction and adoption of the standard in our ecosystem,” according to Sørensen.

Simplifying the customer experience

As Germany’s former incumbent operator, Deutsche Telekom has a very different motivation. It is using Open APIs developed in collaboration with TM Forum members to renew existing wholesale service interfaces for preorder, order and assurance. Its aim is to provide a simpler and more efficient experience to customers and partners. To this end Deutsche Telekom is working in a common working group with other German operators, including Vodafone, EWE TEL and 1&1, to specify which TM Forum Open APIs the German broadband industry will use.

“The German model is not a marketplace. It's a common standard we are discussing all together and that everybody has to implement with CSPs and ISPs communicating directly via these APIs,” says Thon. But although it is not a marketplace to order wholesale broadband access, there are shared platforms, too. In December 2024 Deutsche Telekom took part in the launch of an Open API-based common aggregation platform to handle clearing requests. “Every CSP or ISP … can send his clearing requests via this platform to other partners,” explains Thon.

In addition, Thon sees opportunities to apply members’ work on facilitating national wholesale broadband markets to international markets.

“We have the same challenges,” he says, “especially international leased line business, VPN [virtual private network] products. There is a big market in the international business to use standardized interfaces between the market players to get better processes and to reduce the operational costs.”

Find out more about the Catalyst, or visit it onsite at DTW-25 Ignite in Copenhagen in June.