The increase in demand for high speed mobile services has made it imperative for service providers to evolve their networks steadily towards 4G/LTE (News - Alert) networks.

To cater to the needs of the industry to meet the growth in IP traffic and services, the Broadband Forum published the BroadbandSuite 6.0 release. This will guide service providers to introduce 4G/LTE networks while migrating from existing legacy 2G and 3G mobile backhaul networks. The resulting converged network architecture will be based on IP/MPLS technology.

In a release, Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum (News - Alert) said, “The remarkable growth of mobile traffic, driven by demand for data, video and emerging business services, means that the industry must act quickly. The Broadband Forum continues to develop timely specifications that empower the industry to engineer smart converged mobile backhaul implementations.”

The release was announced at the MPLS and Ethernet World Congress in Paris. BroadbandSuite 6.0 deals with network migration requirements and offers practical resources, specifications and test plans besides featuring best practices to be followed.

The new release combines TDM, ATM, Ethernet and IP services over a converged mobile backhaul network leveraging standards based MPLS thereby giving greater flexibility to operators. It also enables easy migration to 4G/LTE which helps in the handling of the huge volumes in mobile data traffic.

According to the Broadband Forum, the BroadbandSuite 6.0 also highlights the technical specifications and the test plans that are required for Broadband Forum MPLS Certification.

BroadbandSuite 6.0 helps operators deal with new devices like smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles. This is necessary as the global IP traffic will rise significantly as around 15 billion fixed and mobile networked devices and machine-to-machine connections are expected to go live by 2015, according to Cisco and Ericsson (News - Alert).

In December 2011 the Broadband Forum published its new Technical Specification for MPLS in Mobile Backhaul Networks (TR-221). This helps mobile operators as they migrate from traditional TDM networks to packet-based transport technologies and from 2G/3G to 4G and LTE services.