How Industry Open Standards Are Driving Interoperability, Competition, and Future Innovations

In today’s fast-paced, connected world, many of us take for granted that our wireless devices and applications work right out of the box. Laptops can seamlessly and easily connect to any Wi-Fi access point and be managed remotely. How is this possible?

The answer lies in the power of industry standards. These standards foster innovation and create competition, fueling our industry’s need for innovation and product differentiation.

The Driving Factor Behind Standards

Standardization brings new interoperable technologies to the mass commercial market by creating significant value across the entire technology ecosystem. Three overarching factors drive the need for standards:

• Facilitating system interoperability within and across network technologies.
• Promoting greater competition to hold down prices.
• Allowing for better cost efficiencies through economies of scale and multi-vendor sourcing.

IEEE 802.11 Working Group and the Wi-Fi Alliance are the two industry organizations guiding the standardization and promotion of Wi-Fi technologies. The IEEE 802.11 Working Group is responsible for developing and maintaining the global MAC/PHY standards. The Wi-Fi Alliance manages interoperability test programs, conducts regulatory advocacy, and drives general marketing activities.

Open Source vs. Open Standards

Open source software is not the same thing as open standards. Open source projects exist for all sorts of things not governed by a standard body and, in many cases, cover only half of the server-client relationship. Open standards enable interoperability between different devices, systems, and solutions and encourage competition, innovation, and a thriving ecosystem that creates new revenue opportunities for broadband service providers (BSPs).

At Calix, we actively support implementing the following open standards across our platform and hardware systems:

• TR-069 – A management protocol for communication between a Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) and an Auto Configuration Server (ACS) that allows for remote and safe lifecycle management of broadband devices.
• TR-369 – A specification that further improves remote access and lifecycle management of smart and IoT devices, reducing complexity, increasing performance, and enabling new service offerings for multi-vendor, connected home environments.
• Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Data Elements™ – Establishes a set of key performance indicators for Wi-Fi network health, including the number of devices on the network, bandwidth utilization, signal strength, and free airtime.

Open standards like these enable Calix to offer BSPs and their subscribers a rich, cloud-based ecosystem across multiple devices on a single platform. To foster future innovations, Calix has been (and will continue to be) at the forefront of driving a broad set of technology standards and ensuring their success in the marketplace. Standards are critical because they provide BSPs with a foundational software platform and ensure premises hardware systems are indeed subscriber experience aware and multi-vendor interoperable.

Check out our power of standards page to learn more about how committing to industry standards empowers innovation and catalyzes growth for your BSP.