BBWN Bites: EU calls for HD restraint

Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, 3/19/2020

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Also in this roundup: RDK's popular; WBA assumes control of Cisco's OpenRoaming; Virgin Media offers Gigabit to 1 million homes; and more.

European commissioner Thierry Breton (once the CEO of France Telecom, before it became Orange) has asked streaming video services such as Netflix to curb the availability of high-definition video to relieve pressure on the region's broadband access network connections. Breton tweeted:

Important phone conversation with @ReedHastings, CEO of @Netflix

To beat #COVID19, we #StayAtHome

Teleworking & streaming help a lot but infrastructures might be in strain.

To secure Internet access for all, let’s #SwitchToStandard definition when HD is not necessary.
— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) March 18, 2020

For more, see this Reuters article.

Operators have been reporting an increase in data traffic volumes but nothing they haven't been able to handle so far, though Vodafone has noted a 50% rise in data traffic in some markets. (See Vodafone proposes five-point plan to fight COVID-19, With COVID-19 comes the real dawn of the digital age and Home Internet data usage surges amid COVID-19 crisis.)

BT appears to handling data volumes OK so far: Here's a tweet from Neil McRae, the operator's chief architect, from Wednesday:

Today the BT Network saw less traffic than yesterday but still higher than normal for during the day traffic and still well below our peak.
Corporate network traffic was much less today - akin to half term traffic levels. We see a lot more voice calls on the mobile network.
— Neil J. McRae (@neilmcrae) March 18, 2020

The Reference Design Kit (RDK), an open source software platform for set-tops, gateways and other connected devices, has been deployed on more than 60 million devices worldwide, a 20% increase on the 50 million reported roughly a year ago. (See RDK-powered devices surpass 60M, up 20% .)

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) says it plans to "take over ownership and management of OpenRoaming as a global wireless industry standard," a move "designed to facilitate the broad adoption of OpenRoaming by new and existing Wi-Fi Networks." OpenRoaming, which enables easy Wi-Fi onboarding and roaming, was developed by Cisco using a set of specifications and guidelines developed by the WBA and Wi-Fi Alliance. For more details, see this press release.

UK cable operator Virgin Media says it has enabled gigabit broadband for more than 1 million homes in the West Midlands region. The operator says the move is part of its plan to "bring gigabit speeds to nearly 15 million homes across its entire network by the end of 2021." Bring it on! Meanwhile, Openreach, the semi-autonomous access network arm of UK national operator BT, is aiming to pass 4 million premises with fiber by this time next year and 15 million premises by about 2025, while alternative optical access network builders such as CityFibre continue to plow money into the UK's access networks. (See Eurobites: CityFibre accelerates UK network rollout and BBWN Bites: Openreach Seeks New FTTH Supplier.)

The three operators on the Channel Island of Jersey, which has undergone an island-wide upgrade to fiber access during the past few years, have agreed to upgrade their fiber broadband connections to 1 Gbit/s symmetrical for all customers without any change in fees, reports local newspaper the Jersey Evening Post.

— Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading, special to Broadband World News