OEMs in the RDK Broadband community are busy developing new devices to support newly opened 6GHz WiFi bands, according to Comcast’s Executive Director of Systems Architecture, Charles Moreman. Delivering a quick update on RDK-B this week, Moreman applauded the opening of 6GHz bands by regulators the world over, describing the new spectrum as a tremendous greenfield opportunity for WiFi.
As mentioned in our longer story on RDK Video this week, RDK Management has revealed that 80 million devices worldwide are now running RDK software, an impressive 20 million uptick on this time last year. However, as always with these things, RDK refuses to break out numbers by device.
While we are confident that video accounts for the lion’s share of RDK’s 80 million deployments, it would certainly make for interesting reading to see whether device uptake is occurring fastest on the RDK-V or RDK-B side, while IoT devices are also bundled into this figure. The industry is holding out for the day RDK Management is feeling generous.
In the meantime, crucial to driving RDK-B uptake is developing it into a cross-platform technology, with Moreman mentioning the difficulties of operating on a per-vendor basis where different bugs occur across different code, which is why Comcast is creating a hosting implementation with RDK-B to make feature sets more solid.
There is a big focus on WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) data collection within RDK-B right now, to help understand where the gateway is relative to a client and therefore figure out if the gateway can be better positioned. The RDK-B community is also working on improved client steering, using DFS channels to relieve congestion along with 160MHz channels, and new WiFi Telemetry for cloud-based WiFi analysis and WiFi recommendations.
Moreman also highlighted testing the new features available in low latency DOCSIS as an important means of improving gaming experiences, while making a recent market observation about a major pivot on RDK-B, from DOCSIS architectures to multiple access architectures.
Using the word global with RDK has been something of an oxymoron, given its limited presence outside of North America, although that is changing with a smattering of deployments happening in Europe, notably in Germany via Vodafone (RDK-V) and Deutsche Telekom (RDK-B), as well as APAC.
RDK Central Executive Director Jason Briggs commented, “The common refrain we hear from operators is that RDK provides them with maximum versatility and transparency, while keeping them in complete control over their consumer-facing experience and device telemetry.”