(Ingezonden mededeling)

June 24, 2008 - With the deployment of managed home gateways in North America and Western Europe rising from 16.2 [1] million in 2007 to an estimated 34 million [2] in 2009, the device is now a market reality, says the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI), the industry body representing the actors in the broadband home arena.

“The home gateway is not simply a router, but a service enabler,” explains Milan Erbes, ambassador for the HGI and Business Development and Standardization Manager for DS2. “The HGI focuses on the home gateway itself, but encompasses also the Home Network Infrastructure Devices as well, providing guidelines on remote access, parental control in the home, performance metrics, quality of service (QoS) and security.”

Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst with Parks Associates, added: “The deployment of home gateways is accelerating hand-in-hand with the rollout of triple play services. Service providers can benefit from the deployment of managed, QoS-enabled home gateways as value-added differentiators, for remote diagnostics and troubleshooting applications, and to dynamically provision new value-added services as customers see the need.” Among others, key issues that the HGI will be addressing in the coming months include, the support for the SOHO environment, energy saving, extended QoS, diagnostics, Home Network Infrastructure Devices support, the Home Gateway and Network Termination two-boxes approach for Next-Generation Networks, Home Gateway resilience, IPv6 and the evolution of support to IPTV and IMS.

At CONNECTIONS US, Milan Erbes will be speaking on the SOLUTIONS FOR BROADBAND PROVIDERS panel on Thursday, June 26 at 2:15pm. The value-added services and features that will differentiate broadband service offerings and increase customer loyalty will be a centre stage topic during the panel. Frank den Hartog Chair of the Remote Device Management Group from the HGI and Senior Scientist at TNO, will also be speaking during the TM Forum Device Management Summit, which will take place on Tuesday June 24.

Mr. den Hartog will describe the HGI’s outlook on remote management and diagnostics of home gateways and home network infrastructure devices. The HGI was founded and launched by nine telecom operators (Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, NTT, Telefonica and Telecom Italia) in 2004, and now has members from five continents, representing the entire spectrum of actors in the broadband home arena. The main tasks of the HGI are to establish home gateway-related technical and interoperability specifications and provide input to standardisation bodies.

For all media enquires, please email Howard Jones / Daniela Marchesi howard@bcspr.co.uk / daniela@bcspr.co.uk, or call +44 (0)115 948 6901.

[1] Statistics from Parks Associates
[2] Statistics from Parks Associates