World’s First Home Gateway Test Event Proves Major Milestone In Identifying Future Requirements

16 December 2009 - The Home Gateway Initiative’s (HGI) first ever test event – held in October at Orange Labs test laboratories in Lannion (Brittany, France) - has proved an outstanding success and could be a landmark in determining Home Gateway specifications and standards across the global marketplace.

The first industry event focussing on the performance and capabilities of the Home Gateway (HG) attracted  wide interest from HGI member companies, with ten vendors of HGs and HG chips registering to take part in the event - the maximum capability of the laboratory. While the main focus of the test event centred on Quality of Service (QoS) and Multi-session support, the scope of the HG testing also included WiFi performance, USB/file server performance and the EU CoC low power compliance test.

“Unlike other industry events based on protocol interoperability, our test event focused on the performance and features of the Home Gateway itself,” said HGI Chief Technology and Business Officer Duncan Bees.

“This presented unique challenges in terms of the organisation and design of the event, the methods devised for data collection and the dissemination of results and I’m very proud of what the HGI team achieved. We also had very strong vendor support, with all the capacity being totally utilised and we look forward to future events as we build on this tremendous start.”

“The development of a truly world class Home Gateway - complete with a quality of service and protocol interoperability that creates ease of provision by the operator and ease of use by the customer - is obviously of great interest and benefit to France Telecom,” said Thierry Stephant, Head of Access Architecture Laboratory of Orange Labs.
 
“We believe passionately in the work of the HGI and its members and I was delighted to have the opportunity to make our labs available for this landmark series of tests.”

“The establishment of HGI feature requirements as well as holding the test event has proved to be a major milestone for HGI, and I am confident that the process we have designed will help the industry move forward towards the adoption of our HGI requirement documents in the future,” added Mr Bees. “To continue this momentum, HGI will hold future test events, including a test event in 2010, that extend the scope of testing on the home gateway and within the digital home.”

The test event was audited by the representatives from TNO, Telenor and Orange Labs. A summary of results can be found on the HGI web site at www.homegateway.org

The test equipment was sponsored by Spirent.