The world’s leading organisation for defining requirements for the digital home will focus on leading-edge home gateway performance at its third annual test event

2 November 2011 - The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) has today announced details of its largest test event to date, which will take place in the UK in November and December this year. This year’s event will feature strong involvement from NTT, one of the world’s largest broadband service providers, as well as several major Japanese home gateway manufacturers. Home gateway and technology vendors from around the world are also well represented.
HGI Logo
HGI Logo

The 2011 test event will again be hosted by leading global testing and compliance consultancy TRaC at its flagship test facility in Hull, UK. TRaC’s team of telecoms engineers will test the home gateways in eight categories of tests, using its in-house automated systems and multiple test stations.

Duncan Bees, chief technology and business officer at HGI, commented: “Last year’s event and the inaugural one in 2009 were both very successful with wide interest from vendors. We are expecting 2011 to be on an even larger scale, with the scope of our testing growing and more vendors participating.”

“The collaboration with NTT in the test event is an exciting development for HGI. As well as NTT, there will be auditing teams from at least four major European broadband service providers. The HGI test event is the only one in the world where the service providers set the test requirements and form the auditing committee.  This gives it great credibility and enables pre-qualification of vendors’ equipment, at the same time giving an overall annual snapshot of leading-edge home gateway performance,” Bees added.

Global telecommunications company NTT has a customer base of over 50 million in Japan alone. Its service capabilities include fixed lines and mobile communications as well as internet and systems integration services.

Nobuyuki Akazawa, Senior Manager at NTT East, said: “NTT will send three auditors to the 2011 HGI Test Event. This is very important for the industry as key requirements for software modularity and other gateway features will be tested to common requirements, helping manufacturers and operators to provide the best possible services for end-users.”

In addition to software modularity, the test event will focus on performance and capabilities of the home gateway, including Quality of Service, data handling performance, IPv6 features, multi-session support, content sharing, and diagnostics. It will also test the gateway’s compliance with energy efficiency requirements.

Participants choose which tests they will undertake and once the results have been validated by the HGI auditing team, the participants can use them as they wish. Following the event, HGI will publish an anonymised summary of results. Participating companies may also take advantage of the HGI logo program for their tested products.

HGI is the world’s leading member-led organisation devoted to translating broadband service providers’ service plans into published technology requirements for the home.

For more information about the HGI test event, please visit www.homegatewayinitiative.org  or email [email protected].