Back in March 2005, we reported that Europe’s leading phone companies – Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, Telefonica and Telecom Italia plus Japan’s NTT had formed an alliance called the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI). Its stated objective was to work with product and service suppliers to develop better home gateway and consumer network products that would meet common industry standards, thus increasing compatibility.
This week HGI CTO Duncan Bees said new capabilities in the Home Gateway are coming very soon. He said HG is emerging as the connectivity and services platform for the converging communications and multimedia world.
Bees was speaking to attendees during a session called “Bringing the Network into the Home: From Connected Home to Real Digital Home” which was part of this week’s Broadband World Forum in Paris.
He said HGI’s Release 3 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.
Upcoming HGI topics will be over-the-top services, diagnostics and troubleshooting, migration to next-generation access (NGAs), reducing energy usage, home network infrastructure devices and Powerline requirements.
HGI’s first-ever test event takes place September 28 to October 2. Gateway vendors and chipset makers will have the opportunity to demonstrate that their implementations meet the requirements contained in a test specification agreed by the HGI service providers.