Broadband Forum launches certification programme

Industry forums love launching certification programmes, and the Broadband Forum is no different. On Tuesday, at the MPLS & Ethernet World Congress in Paris, the forum announced its first ever certification programme to help drive multi-service network architectures and equipment interoperability testing.

The programme is designed to verify adherence to critical IP/MPLS, broadband and digital home and business specifications – areas of vital importance to the networking industry.

This should give service providers assurance that different vendor products conform to globally recognised and adopted technology standards promoting interoperability, as well as deliver a single industry-approved, and therefore more cost effective, test and certification process.

The Broadband Forum said Tuesday that five companies have already participated and their products have passed the BBF.248 test suite; Alcatel-Lucent, Axerra, Cisco, Huawei, and Juniper.

“The increase of mobile data traffic is putting a lot of challenges on mobile backhaul to provide the required capacity in a cost-effective way. We see MPLS as a viable option for meeting this challenge, and believe this certification program will advance the deployment of MPLS-based backhaul solutions in the market,” said Alain Maloberti, VP of network architecture and design for Orange.