According to Duncan Bees, the chief technology officer of the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI), the Home Gateway continues to emerge as the connectivity and services platform for the converging communications and multimedia world.
The Home Gateway Initiative is a non-profit organisation launched by a number of communications companies - Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, Teliasonera, NTT, Telefonica, Telecom Italia - in 2004 to develop a common stand in home IP gateways.
The initiative - which has had several vendors join in the last few years - is expected to bear fruit next year, when the first Home Gateways are released for public purchase and usage,
In developing the Home Gateway standard, the association has said it is building on the work of existing bodies, such as the ITU, Broadband forum, DLNA and OSGi Alliance, and will contribute to appropriate standards bodies such as the ITU-T.
Speaking on Tuesday 8 September at the Broadband World Forum in Paris, Bees said that bringing the network into the home is a major step for home networking.
"Broadband service providers need additional technology to help them deploy revenue-generating applications in the customers' home and Release 3 (of the standard) will substantially enable them to increase their ability to do that", he said.
"We are seeing a widening work programme HGI as the service providers build new capabilities within their access networks and expand the scope of digital home services they offer to their customers", he added.
"HGI provides a unique industry forum where tremendous progress in articulating technical requirements is being made by the service providers and their vendor partners within this expanding scope."
Infosecurity notes that Bees' address comes under a month before the HGI is planning to host its first ever test event in Lannion (Brittany, France) to assess the functionalities of a number of home gateway devices.
In the trials - which take place between 28 September and 2 October - the plan is to monitor the quality of service and multi-session support of the various home gateway devices.