Addressing a packed conference hall at Broadband World Forum Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) Board Member David Thorne emphasised that despite overwhelming industry changes the Home Gateway is still absolutely critical to realising new services.   

Thorne said: “Even in the brave new world of cloud-based and over-the-top services, the Home Gateway has a central role to play in both enabling services, as well as in providing services directly in its capacity as an applications platform.”

“The Home Gateway is always there, which makes it perfect for home energy management, security and home health.  It’s always on for services which require 24/7 connectivity such as security, home comms and home storage. And it’s also a single, central point of control, making it reliable. With the home environment becoming increasingly complicated these are important properties.”

The announcement comes soon after the group’s quarterly meeting in Chicago where the HGI’s energy task force, along with executives from the ZigBee Alliance, together discussed the application of ZigBee standards to Home Energy Management (HEM) services under specification within HGI.

HGI’s HEM work builds on already published material aimed at reducing the energy footprint related to broadband services.

The Chicago meeting also had dedicated discussions on next-generation communications, key performance indicators for home networking technologies, and power state management of home network connected devices.

HGI was founded in 2004 by telecom operators and has since been an important voice in the development of next generation services to the home. It works by setting use-cases, service needs, and requirements for Home Gateways, infrastructure devices, and the home network.

During his presentation at Broadband World Forum Thorne also discussed a new test event that would be audited by some of the world’s largest broadband service providers among other influential telecoms players.

A strong line-up of speakers featured at Broadband World Forum, each giving their own views about the future of home and mobile communications.

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