Scope is widening for Home Gateway Initiative – CTO Duncan Bees tells audience at Broadband World Forum in Paris

9 September 2009 - Major new capabilities in the Home Gateway (HG) are coming very soon as the HG continues to emerge as the connectivity and services platform for the converging communications and multimedia world, said HGI Chief Technology Officer Duncan Bees yesterday.

Mr Bees was addressing a panel of leading industry representatives during a discussion entitled, “Bringing the Network into the Home – From Connected Home to Real Digital Home”, being staged at the Broadband World Forum event in Paris. He told the audience that HGI’s Release 3 development would add major capabilities in software modularity, energy management, LAN and WAN connectivity, IPv6, enhanced diagnostics, Home Network Infrastructure management and testing.

“Broadband service providers need additional technology to help them deploy revenue-generating applications in the customers’ home and Release 3 will substantially enable them to increase their ability to do that,” he said.

“We are seeing a widening work programme HGI as the service providers build new capabilities within their access networks and expand the scope of digital home services they offer to their customers. HGI provides a unique industry forum where tremendous progress in articulating technical requirements is being made by the service providers and their vendor partners within this expanding scope.

Themes for HGI for this year and next include diagnostics and troubleshooting, migration to Next Generation Access (NGAs), reducing energy usage, Over the Top Services, new features and interfaces for the residential profile, home network infrastructure devices and powerline requirements.

Mr Bees’ address came less than a month before the organisation holds its first ever test event in Lannion (Brittany, France) to assess functionalities in both Home Gateway products and reference designs. The scope for this unique event, running from September 28 to October 2, will cover two main topic areas – Quality of Service (QoS) and Multi-session support.

“This is an exciting development for HGI, which will give gateway vendors and chipset makers the opportunity to demonstrate that their implementations meet the requirements contained in a test specification agreed by the HGI service providers,” said Mr Bees.

“Vendors will be able to use the audited test results to demonstrate compliance with each specified HGI test.”

The HGI, founded in 2004 by nine telecom operators, is shaping the next generation of internet and voice services. Starting from use-cases and service needs, the HGI sets requirements for Home Gateways, infrastructure devices, and the home network. The HGI now has members from across the globe, representing the entire spectrum of players in the broadband home area.