Our team is happy to publish this blog recap of Incognito's most recent webinar with the Broadband Forum!
Can Service Providers Balance Openness, Security, and Speed?
As customer expectations evolve and competition intensifies, communication service providers (CSPs) are under more pressure than ever to innovate—particularly when it comes to value‑added services (VAS). While offerings like managed Wi‑Fi, cybersecurity, parental controls, and AI‑driven network optimization are not new, the way they are delivered is undergoing a fundamental transformation.
In Incognito's recent Broadband Forum webinar, Accelerating VAS Innovation: Strategies for CSPs to Balance Openness, Security, and Speed, we explored the opportunities and challenges shaping the next generation of service experiences. Here are the key takeaways.
The VAS Opportunity Is Growing—But Complexity Is Too
CSPs have long recognized the revenue and loyalty potential of value‑added services. Today, the most mature and widely deployed categories include:
- Managed Wi‑Fi
- Cybersecurity services
- Parental controls
- AI‑powered customer support and network optimization
What has changed, however, is the scale, speed, and flexibility required to keep up with customer needs. Operators want to launch services faster, iterate quickly, and avoid the siloed architectures that have slowed innovation for decades.
Openness and Flexibility Are Now Strategic Imperatives
Introducing new services often means adding new vendors, integrating new components, or replacing existing ones. This raises a core challenge: How can CSPs innovate quickly without creating new operational silos?
A few critical factors emerged:
- Flexible Vendor and Service Integration: CSPs need an architecture that allows them to plug in new services—and remove or replace them—without months of re‑engineering.
- Secure, Unified Service Delivery: Operators don't just need to offer security services to customers—they also need secure, controlled mechanisms for onboarding and managing the services themselves.
- Agility to Fail Fast and Scale Fast: Innovation means experimentation. Operators want the ability to launch, test, learn, and either scale or sunset services quickly.
AI Is No Longer Optional According to Omdia Broadband Forum Future of Connected Home report, more than 70% of CSPs rate AI as important or very important—yet many are still in early stages of adoption.
The strongest AI use cases include:
- Network optimization
- Traffic management
- Customer support
- Predictive maintenance
- Threat and anomaly detection
AI success depends on access to massive amounts of high‑quality telemetry data. That data may be processed at the edge or in the cloud, but in every scenario, proper data handling and orchestration are essential.
USP Is Now a Core Enabler for Next‑Gen Services
More than half of operators have already deployed or are deploying USP, according to the survey referenced in the webinar. This aligns with what we see across the industry—User Services Platform (USP) TR-369 has become a foundational standard for next‑gen device management and service deployment.
The top two reasons CSPs adopt USP:
- Real‑time telemetry collection
- Application deployment through an on‑device marketplace/catalog
Modern ecosystems, such as Prpl LCM, make it possible to deploy containerized applications in days, compared to the lengthy firmware cycles of the past.
But deploying an app to the CPE is only part of the story.
Service Deployment Requires More Than Just the CPE
For a VAS to be commercially viable, CSPs must integrate it with:
- Billing systems
- Product catalogs
- Licensing platforms
- Cloud configurations
- Assurance and monitoring tools
Operators need unified orchestration, not isolated deployments. Success depends on ensuring every part of the ecosystem—device, cloud, back‑office systems—moves in sync.
Scaling Securely: Real‑World Proof Points
One standout example shared during the webinar was the largest live USP deployment we know of (which happens to be a leading Incognito customer!), with:
- 8+ million devices
- 6–8 containerized applications per device
This scale simply wasn't feasible with legacy TR‑069 approaches. Today's customers are running USP on:
- RDK devices
- Prplware
- OpenWRT
- Vendor‑specific hardware
And with partners across the ecosystem, even legacy devices—including those 8–10 years old—can be upgraded to support USP‑based services.
The Path Forward: Faster Innovation, Stronger Security, Happier Customers
VAS innovation today is about more than delivering a single app. It's about:
- Orchestrating the full service lifecycle
- Ensuring secure, consistent deployments
- Enabling agility through modular, cloud‑aligned architectures
- Supporting AI‑driven insights from rich device telemetry
- Empowering CSPs to experiment and scale with confidence
When done right, customers benefit from more personalized, more secure, more reliable experiences—while CSPs drive new revenue and deeper loyalty.
If you're exploring how to accelerate your VAS roadmap—or how to modernize your device management foundation—at Incognito Software Systems we're always happy to continue the conversation. Request a meeting with our team today!
If you missed the live session or would like to revisit specific topics, you can watch the on-demand webinar recording below.
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