prpl Foundation

The prpl Foundation is the open-source community for carrier-grade customer premise equipment. Its stacks — prplOS, prplMesh, prpl Life-Cycle Management, prplSecurity, collectively prplWare — are the reference software most tier-one operators building open CPE are either deploying or evaluating. If the Foundation has a natural upstream in the CPE and broadband-gateway space, this is it.

We collaborate with prpl for a practical reason: the wired technologies we work on — G.hn, MoCA, PON, Ethernet — have to land in the gateway. A spec or a reference integration is only useful if the carrier-grade software layer above it can actually invoke it, manage it, and reason about it. prplOS and prplMesh are that layer for a growing share of the market.

Where our work meets prpl’s

Integrating G.hn and MoCA with prplOS and prplMesh

The home plant is not only Wi-Fi. Every real deployment includes wired backhaul, and the best wired backhaul for brownfield homes is almost never new cable — it is Gigabit Home Networking over existing copper or MoCA over existing coax. The carrier-grade software needs first-class integration with those technologies, not ad-hoc bridges that every OEM re-invents.

Our work threads G.hn and MoCA into prplOS and prplMesh: consistent configuration models, consistent telemetry, consistent security posture. The result is a carrier-grade CPE that treats wired backhaul as a native part of the mesh rather than a second-class neighbour.

Open APIs for hybrid wired deployments

prpl’s approach has been open APIs from the start — a high-level API for carrier-grade manageability, a low-level API for chipset portability. Our contribution is to extend that API surface into the hybrid-wired problem space: deploying and managing a home network that mixes Ethernet, G.hn, MoCA, PON, and Wi-Fi as one coordinated fabric, rather than four siloed stacks.

An operator should be able to provision, monitor, and secure a hybrid-wired home the same way they provision, monitor, and secure a Wi-Fi-only one — with one API, one data model, one operations runbook.

AI-enhanced orchestration across Ethernet switches and CPE

The CPE is no longer the last thing in the chain. For a growing share of operators, the CPE is the edge — the place where anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, and closed-loop remediation increasingly run. That pulls the Ethernet switch behind the gateway into the same operational loop.

Foundation reference pipelines for AI-assisted operations (see edgeAIOps) are designed to run across that seam cleanly: switch telemetry and CPE telemetry unified, models that understand mixed-media homes, and remediation that respects the operator’s change-control process rather than surprising it.

Software-defined networking for the carrier edge

The Foundation’s open control plane work (see openEdgeFabric) is designed to plug into prpl-family CPE through prpl’s existing APIs. That means an operator adopting prplOS doesn’t have to choose between open carrier software and open hybrid-wired infrastructure — they get both, with clean seams between them.

Open, secure, and interoperable wired infrastructure

prplSecurity provides an open security framework for embedded and networking environments, including hardware-supported virtualisation and standards-based APIs for secure embedded platforms. Our CRA-aware security work (craKit) is designed to be consumable from a prplSecurity-aligned CPE without bolt-on translation — the threat models, SBOM conventions, and hardening profiles align on purpose.

AI-enhanced service delivery across hybrid networks

prpl Life-Cycle Management enables service providers to manage the life cycles of containerised software components on CPE, with cloud-side orchestration through Broadband Forum USP and TR-181. The Foundation contributes the hybrid-wired context those services increasingly need: telemetry schemas that span wired and wireless, policy primitives that understand mixed-media backhaul, and reference apps that exercise the full hybrid-wired surface.

The goal is a service-delivery platform where a new third-party application — whether for security, analytics, or AI-assisted household insight — does not have to care whether the home is wired over coax, copper, or Ethernet. It just works, everywhere prpl ships.

How the collaboration works

• Technical exchange. Joint technical sessions between our working groups and prpl’s, with public notes.
• Upstream-first contributions. Where work belongs in prplOS, prplMesh, prplLCM, or prplSecurity, it lands there — not in a fork.
• Shared conformance. Test suites that cover both the wired-technology integration and the carrier-grade API surface, with publicly published results.
• Open attribution. Every collaborative output is attributed in both directions, and every collaborative spec carries both provenance lines.

prpl is an independent foundation with its own governance, roadmap, and identity — this page describes a collaboration, not a merger. The prpl Foundation website is the canonical source for everything prpl-specific.

For operators and OEMs evaluating this

Two practical notes.

If you are already shipping prpl-based CPE: the Foundation’s hybrid-wired extensions are designed to plug in through prpl’s existing APIs. You should not have to re-architect anything to pick them up.

If you are evaluating prpl adoption: the collaboration removes the main objection we hear, which is that open carrier-grade software is strong on Wi-Fi and weak on wired. That gap is what this collaboration is for.

Questions about scope, timelines, or joining a working group? Use the contact page.