Identification of key areas to enable ubiquitous service access from mobile and fixed devices
April, 2012 – The Broadband Forum, DECT Forum, HGI, Open IPTV Forum, Open Mobile Alliance and the Small Cell Forum held a successful workshop to investigate shared issues and opportunities to enhance support of services in the home. Hosted by the Open Mobile Alliance, the Home Environment Services workshop convened immediately preceding the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and identified shared focus areas in the rapidly diversifying home environment-
• addressing the ever expanding range of computing and connected devices in the home environment
• ensuring devices in the home have quality of service regardless of the access method, i.e. 3G, UMTS, LTE, DSL, Fibre, Cable, WiFi…
• offering users ubiquitous access to converging services across devices in the home as well as seamless handover from one device to another in terms of service continuity
• strengthening and standardising wired and wireless support of Device Management
• supporting Machine to Machine (M2M) devices which are playing an increasingly important role in the extended distribution of services, and need a common management platform
• empowering users of devices in the home environment to exploit other capabilities such as centralised address books and access to rich multimedia content repositories
Mark Cataldo, Chairman of the Board of the Open Mobile Alliance and Workshop Chairman, greeted the success of the Workshop saying “The Open Mobile Alliance is very pleased that our organisations have come together to address this key technology area. By cooperating, our organisations, OMA’s service enablers and APIs will enrich the support of multimedia services across the rapidly diversifying range of devices.”
Robin Mersh, Broadband Forum CEO adds “It is increasingly evident that in today’s rapidly developing market, not only is the remote management of devices needed, but it’s crucial for both fixed devices and mobile devices. Co-operation between the various SDO’s and fora is both necessary and very welcome.”
With the advancing introduction of M2M devices, they require remote management and their distinctive functionalities provide exciting opportunities to create new services. Andy Germano, the Small Cell Forum Vice Chairman stated “The availability of service applications and APIs in the handset and home access points is quickly enabling the introducing of exciting services which build on recognising the user’s presence in the home.” Oliver Maiwald, DECT Forum Board member says “The home environment is becoming increasingly exciting, with support of smart metering, home control units and gateways facilitating an explosion in services.”
Hans-Werner Bitzer, HGI Vice Chair stated “Together with our partners, HGI is making enabling steps towards convergence by providing a modular and manageable application platform and service APIs for home connected services.” Mohammed Dadas, representing the Open IPTV Forum continued “With device discovery, content distribution/transfer, and content protection, the home is creating a mass market for IPTV services of the future.”
The fora are now investigating how to further cooperate around these shared interest areas, and look forward to continued development and promotion of emerging services in the home environment.
ENDS
