Bridging telcos and manufacturers for the benefit of customer

The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) is announced today by a number of leading telecommunications companies: Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, NTT ,Telefonica, Telecom Italia.

The HGI will be an open forum where operators, content providers, service providers and manufacturers will discuss home gateway key specifications and standards.

The goal of the HGI is to improve the interoperability of gateways with connected home devices throughout the EU and the rest of the world, as well as reducing the costs of home gateways to customers. The initiative will drive the development of residential gateways supporting the delivery of services to the home and the market for home communications services will receive a major boost for the benefit of millions of broadband consumers.

The main tasks of the HGI are to establish technical and interoperability specifications and provide input to standardisation bodies.

The HGI will base its work on existing standards (ITU-T H 610, DSL Forum, UPnP, DLNA . . .) and identify the gaps in those standards that need to be filled.

In addition to the founding members of the Initiative, several telecommunications operators and manufacturers have expressed their interest in joining the alliance.

For more information, please visit the web site www.homegatewayinitiative.org
The "Home Gateway Initiative” is constituted as an association under the Swiss law and registered in Geneva.
The boiler plates of the different companies can be found on HGI web site on the following link.

Press contacts
Belgacom
Jan Margot at 02 202 85 01 or 0475 58 50 37
British Telecom
Group Press Office
Mike Bartlett, Gemma Thomas
Telephone +44 20 7356 5369
Deutsche Telekom
Unternehmenskommunikation
Pressestelle
Telefon +49 228 181-4949
France Telecom
Contact Presse
Caroline Ponsi: caroline.ponsi@francetelecom.com
Sebastien Goales: sebastien.goales@francetelecom.com
Tel :+ 33 1 44 44 93 93
KPN
KPN Press Office
Tel :+ 31 70 44 66 300
NTT
NTT Cyber Communications Laboratory Group
Planning Division, PR Section
Tel : 046-859-2032
E-mail : ckoho@lab.ntt.co.jp
Telecom Italia
Media Relations
Corporate and Wireline Press Office
+39.06.3688.2610
Telefonica

TeliaSonera AB Head Office
Marianne Laurell
tel: +46-70-5928005
email: Marianne.Laurell@teliasonera.com