25 August 2010 – Following on from the success of its first test event in 2009, the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) has today announced that it will be holding a second test event at the end of this year.

HGI’s second annual test event, which will take place from November 22 to December  3 in the UK, will continue to focus on the performance and capabilities of the Home Gateway including quality of service and multi-session support, and will also feature software modularity and IPv6 testing for the first time.

Duncan Bees, chief technology and business officer at HGI, commented: “Last year’s test event proved very successful, with wide interest and support from both vendors and chipset manufacturers, and enabled the industry to have a uniform means of assessing the performance of Home Gateways for the first time.

“Our aim this year is to extend the scope of testing to match new capabilities being rolled out by service providers, while increasing the coverage of existing features.  The increased scope will mean the HGI test event will be an even better yardstick for evaluation of home gateway capabilities.”

During the event, vendors choose which tests they participate in. Once the test results have been reviewed and validated between the vendor and the HGI auditing team, the vendors will be free to use the audited results as they wish, whilst the HGI management committee will publish an anonymous summary of the results.

Duncan continued: “The main focus areas of the event are, as last year, HG data handling performance, quality of service, multi-session support, and energy efficiency. New for this year, the HG testing will also include software modularity and IPv6, as well as more complete wifi, energy efficiency, and broadband connectivity

“Software modularity enables the HG to support a flexible set of applications that can be managed by the service provider and offered to the broadband subscriber. The HGI tests will be a validation of modularity requirements already set forth by HGI working with partner organisations. In turn, testing HG performance with IPv6 in addition to IPv4 will be an important step in enabling a seamless deployment of IPv6-enabled HG, and this deployment reality is fast approaching.”

The test plan is due to be finalised at HGI’s Q3 meeting, which will take place from September 27 to October 1 in Vancouver, Canada.

Founded in 2004, HGI is the world’s leading member-led organisation devoted to translating broadband service providers’ service plans into published technology requirements for home enablers.

For more information about the Vancouver meeting or this year’s test event, please visit www.homegatewayinitiative.org or email [email protected].