Simplifying wholesale broadband sales through standardization

Commercial context

As the fiber broadband market expands, there is an increasingly pressing need for a common standard for defining access products. The existing bespoke IT solutions can lead to communication gaps during service provision, impacting customer experience, and presenting challenges for CSPs, wholesalers, and retailers alike. In some markets, wholesale providers have been implementing TM Forum industry standards differently, hampering seamless integration and interoperability between different technologies and vendors, while exacerbating issues associated with legacy systems. Without a well-defined standard, every retailer must make a custom integration for each wholesaler they would like to connect to or buy services from. This requires a full integration and implementation project for every new wholesaler, meaning complexity can grow exponentially over time for both buyer and seller.

The adoption of standardized context-specific processes, APIs and data models would make it easier to achieve interoperability between CSPs. “TM Forum has established a comprehensive set of standards with the Open APIs, specifically designed to address diverse business scenarios,” notes Timothy Bird, Principal Enterprise Architect at CityFibre Ltd. Without these “overarching model definitions, there will be increased integration costs between service providers and wholesale carriers and potentially increased automation fallout and friction, particularly where the service provider integrates with more than one wholesale carrier.”

The solution

This Catalyst takes advantage of the changes in the latest version of TM Forum’s APIs to create common context-specific processes, data models and APIs for use on different payloads. The first phase of the Catalyst is focused on product and service ordering, addressing, appointing and trouble ticket capabilities, to support interoperability between fiber wholesalers and service providers. The Catalyst is also developing a set of templates and a sample implementation on the ODA Canvas (an execution environment for open digital architecture components) CSPs can use as a starting point for their own implementations. As well as helping existing players, these technology-agnostic tools will reduce the time and cost to market for new entrants by providing a ready-made reference implementation, so they don’t need to start from scratch.

Application and wider value

While employing the TM Forum standards, the project team is developing tools that are flexible enough to allow for innovation and differentiation. The goal is to achieve around 80-90% commonality so that companies can have a mostly common set of integration and orchestration services for multiple partners, but still have scope for vendor customization. That level of commonality of order processes should be sufficient to reduce the cost and complexity of selling fiber broadband between partners.

The standardization will also allow for greater automation. With a framework of well-defined milestones and jeopardy events, both the wholesale carrier and the service provider can apply common orchestration patterns that cover the majority of the order and assurance journeys. That reduces the likelihood of offline interactions and manual processes, and therefore further reduces costs for both the wholesale carrier and service provider.

A common standard for defining fiber broadband access products will enable growth for both retailers and wholesale, by opening up new business opportunities. For example, it will be easier for wholesalers to work with partners if they use a TM Forum-defined set of product models, milestones and statuses, which will make the implementations of new solutions more straightforward. At the same time, more commonality could pave the way for mergers and acquisitions, within the regulatory constraints on the wholesale market.

To learn more about how this initiative could simplify and improve interoperability between fiber wholesalers and service providers, please click here to view the project space on the TM Forum website.