The Broadband Forum and the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to jointly establish the Open Broadband Laboratory Asia (OBLA) and to advance network transformation and cloud evolution. The agreement was announced at the recent China SDN/NFV Conference in Beijing.
Open Broadband Laboratories are collaborative environments designed for integration, staging, and testing of open-source and commercial software, standards-based solutions, and vendor implementations. These labs enable vendors, integrators, and network operators to work together on developing, validating, and ensuring the interoperability of new and coexisting technologies.
Under the terms of the MoU, the Broadband Forum has authorised the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance to build OBLA in China and to undertake conformance and interoperability testing, define migration best practices, perform technical due diligence, and deliver training associated with the initiative. The OBLA facility will be constructed and managed by the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance, while the Broadband Forum will contribute technical guidance, testing methodologies, a standards framework, and domain expertise.
The OBLA initiative expands on the Broadband Forum’s portfolio of virtualization and cloud-focused projects. These include the Network Enhanced Residential Gateway, which relocates certain gateway functions from the customer premise to the operator’s network; the Cloud Central Office; Fixed Access Network Sharing; SDN deployments in the access network; and the virtual Business Gateway. Together, these projects inform the lab’s scope and provide practical blueprints for operational transformation.
Wei Leping, president of the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance and China Telecom Beijing Research Institute, highlighted the industry challenges the lab aims to address: “The absence of unified standards and a common framework for Network Cloud and SDN has caused fragmentation across the industry, undermining interoperability and slowing development.”
He added: “As one of the foremost organisations in broadband, the Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband Lab can serve as a unified, standardised platform to tackle fragmentation and address the practical problems facing operators, vendors, and integrators.”
By combining the Broadband Forum’s standards expertise and testing methodologies with the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance’s local implementation and management capabilities, OBLA seeks to accelerate practical adoption of virtualisation, SDN, and cloud-native architectures across the region. The lab will support collaborative testing of multi-vendor stacks, validate migration strategies for operators, and provide hands-on training to technical staff—helping to reduce deployment risks and shorten time-to-market for interoperable solutions.
OBLA’s activities are expected to include structured conformance test plans, end-to-end interoperability scenarios, and operational playbooks that reflect real-world deployment conditions. This practical focus is intended to create repeatable, vendor-neutral processes that operators can use when migrating functions to cloud-based infrastructures or deploying SDN-driven access network architectures.
Ultimately, the new Open Broadband Laboratory Asia aims to foster an ecosystem where open standards, shared testing resources, and collaborative development reduce fragmentation, improve interoperability, and accelerate the evolution of broadband networks toward more flexible, cloud-centric models.