Home Gateway Initiative - Vision

Evolution of the broadband market until today
Home connectivity is evolving from narrowband to broadband. From the initial voice service, home services have evolved in the 80s to data services like fax and video text. At the start of the 21st century, the world has entered into broadband. The network operators have deployed the technology to offer a larger bandwidth with DSL, cable or fibre technologies.
The Internet has been a major driver for the evolution to broadband creating a new experience for the customer and offering him new services such as eMail, browsing, access to the World Wide Web and the “online” services such as digital photo lab, ticket booking etc.

New trends in the market
Whereas Broadband was once about the delivery of high-speed internet access and services to a PC, it is now being driven beyond the PC, to other devices and services in the home. This is driving up customers requirements for a home network. The main drivers for home networking that exist today are:

1. Wifi. Devices such as laptops that are Wifi enabled are encouraging consumers to move out of the study and away from the fixed, desktop PC, tied to a phone line.
2. Content sharing. As media becomes increasingly digital in nature (online music and video, digital photos etc.), consumers are wanting to share that content and listen or display it on other, more consumer-friendly devices such as TV’s and Hifi’s. This requires customers to connect their digital content storage devices (PC’s, MP3 players and digital cameras/camcorders) to their entertainment systems.
3. Multiple devices wish to share the broadband connection. Game consoles, multiple PC’s, MP3 players all want an internet connection, so the consumer needs some way to share that connection amongst those devices, simultaneously.
4. Multiple service providers want to deliver services to consumers. Big players from the consumer electronics, entertainment industry and PC industry are all offering consumers services that link a broadband connection to devices in the home.
5. VoIP. More and more customers want to use digital voice. There is first the attractiveness of price and also the high quality promise.

Leading to issues and future requirements

But home networking is complex to manage for both the customer and for the service provider who is often the first point of contact when a customer encounters a problem. So there is clearly a need to either simplify home networking, or for the service provider to manage the home network on behalf of the customer.
Also customers want to access broadband services from any appliance in the home, which means that the device must be integrated to the home broadband environement and the services need to be adapted to the capabilities of the device.
There is also an opportunity to federate the different capabilities of the different devices in the home and integrate them to offer a complete set of new services to the end consumers. There is the possibility also to offer a new generation of communication services inside the home using the different display and speakers (video rich communication), a new generation of audiovisual services (content broadcasting on TV or Hifi). It could also offer the customer the capability to exchange multimedia content in a simple matter between a home device and a TV in another home with the cooperation of the network.
There is also the need to offer connectivity to devices that are not network capable in order to enlarge the range of services offered to the customers.
It is also expected that customers will increasingly demand the same service set from wherever they are – beyond the home or office environment. For example - from the Wifi hotspot, from hotels, or even other consumer homes. To enable this, common capabilities that are network independent must be introduced (for example directory, authentication, etc.) and also device indepent (any screen can be used to access a customer service set).

What this device should be

The device that initially offered broadband access was a basic modem and has evolved to a wireless enabled modem router to meet the demand of consumers.
But this equipment is not enough to meet the next generation of services, thus there is a need of a more capable device that we call “home gateway”. The home gateway is the device offering broadband connectivity to the home and delivering services to the home environment and the different devices & interfaces composing it.

Requirements

The next generation of services has created the new requirements for the home gateway to fulfill:

• Providing a remote management service for the home gateway & the devices beyond,
• Allowing the right device or application to connect to the right service platform with the right service class / Quality of Service,
• Recognizing and potentially uniting devices capabilities
• Playing a role in the local network to federate device capabilities and offer customers a better “integrated home environment”.

Role of the home gateway initiative
For these requirements to be met, a common set of requirements for the Home Gateway must be defined. The Home Gateway Initiative should seek to achieve this with industry support and at lowest economical cost.
The Home Gateway Initiative will try to work as much as possible on an access generic home gateway, though the main underlying technologies envisionned are first xDSL, and fiber technologies.