The recently held kick-off meeting of the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) was a great success! Optimistic estimates had lead the organisers to expect about 75 people but in fact more than 120 participants representing 45 companies attended the event, with most of these companies deciding to join the forum. As well as the initiative’s founding operators, two other European operators took part – Swisscom and Telenor – as well as the Australian operator Telstra.
The home Gateway Initiative was founded and launched by 9 telecom operators: Belgacom, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, NTT, Telefonica, Telecom Italia. However, the first plenary session of the Kick-off meeting was open to the other leading companies, active in the residential gateway domain. The founding members presented the initiative’s goal to rapidly specify a low cost, high capability end-to-end multi-service residential gateway between access networks and residential devices, with the first Technical Specifications due for release by the end of 2005.
Delegates from the new members and founding members of HGI then considered the standardisation landscape of home networks and services. There are at least ten Standard Developing Organisations specifying tools or protocols, but until now there has not been work on a global architecture for home gateways and the surrounding environment capable of delivering administered and secured home services.
Meetings of the working group for Business Requirements and the Technical Specification Working Groups completed the formal proceedings. Momentum has now been given: the aim is now to work together to keep it, to increase it, and to finally complete a set of market driven coherent specifications.
Manufacturers in the field turned up in full force: 2Wire, Alcatel, Analog Devices, AVM GmbH, BeWan, BridgeCo, Cisco, Coaxsys, Corinex, ECI Telecom, Fraunhofer ESK, Hitachi, IBBT, IBM, InAccess networks SA, Infineon, Intel, Jungo Software, Linksys, Lucent, Marconi, Microsoft TV, Motive, Motorola, Nokia, Philips CE, Pirelli, PMC Sierra, Sagem, Siemens, ST Microelectronics, Thomson, TNO ICT, Trialog and Zyxel Communications.
The slides of the open session as well as general information on the HGI are available on the HGI web site at http://www.homegatewayinitiative.org.
The "Home Gateway Initiative” is constituted as
an association under the Swiss law and registered in Geneva.
For more information contact:
contact@homegatewayinitiative.org
