Broadcom announced the launch of the industry's first fully integrated chip for virtual client devices

     Broadcom has introduced the industry's first fully integrated system-on-chip (SoC) for virtual client devices (VCpes). Broadcom's latest SOCs are designed to give operators the flexibility to add new services in an ever-changing and multi-vendor competitive environment. Broadcom will be showcasing its leading technology at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, March 2-5 to advance the mobile and carrier ecosystem. For more news, please visit the Broadcom press room.

     Today's legacy business access solutions are hard-wired and lack fault management and standardized operations, management and maintenance (OAM), which impacts the agility needed to quickly deliver new services. Broadcom's new SOCs accelerate market adoption by giving operators the ability to decouple physical hardware on top of a standard computing infrastructure, allowing customers to customize their devices to meet evolving needs.

     Ed Redmond, Broadcom's vice president of Computing and Connectivity, said: "One of the big challenges for service providers is how to deliver new services to enterprise customers faster and more cost-effectively. By delivering and activating decouple services from the physical infrastructure, Broadcom's integrated programmable devices enable operators to set up services as virtual network functions (VNFs) without the need for manual delivery and costly house calls."

     Dr. Han Li, Deputy Director of the Institute of Network Technology, China Mobile Research Institute, said, "China Mobile is an innovator and staunch supporter of converged access to the Packet-based Transport Network (PTN). We are rolling out enterprise access to PTN with open software-defined network interfaces by deploying Super PTN. We are pleased to see Broadcom launch the BCM88312 vCPE chip to provide a cost-effective, open and standardized solution to help expand the market."

     The Broadcom BCM88312 is an integrated programmable device that seamlessly integrates with carrier networks to deliver vCPE services. The BCM88312 is based on Broadcom's Openflow-data Plane Abstraction (OF-DPA) layer framework and is managed through OpenFlow to extend OF-DPA from the infrastructure core to enterprise CPE access.

     According to Infonetics' recent report, SDN and NFV Strategies: According to the Global Service Provider Survey (SDN and NFV Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey), the primary use case for operators looking to virtualize networks is vCPE. Michael Howard, Principal Analyst at Infonetics/IHS, said: "52% of service providers surveyed deployed vCPE in 2014 or will deploy VCPE in 2015. At the same time, vCPE tops the list of business revenue generating use cases. Broadcom's fully integrated device is the first SoC on the market to integrate the necessary vCPE capabilities into a single device, managed through OpenFlow, to support carrier-grade applications."