25 June 2010 - The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) today announced the significant progress it has made in its smart energy requirements work following a successful Summit held with other leading stakeholder organisations.

The Smart Energy Services Summit was organised by HGI and brought together key industry fora and standards developing organisations - Beywatch, the Broadband Forum,  Energy@Home and ETSI (Technical Committees M2M and TISPAN WG5 NGN Home Networking) – who are, together with HGI, all looking to facilitate reductions in energy consumption. Also present at the meeting was a cross section of companies within the field, including broadband service providers, energy utilities, smart meter providers, chip providers, and broadband equipment vendors.

The participants took time to review the HGI’s initial business architecture model and discuss key issues regarding the role of the broadband service providers and energy utilities in providing services to monitor and control energy consumption within the home, both locally and remotely. The enhanced software architecture developed within HGI will allow these services to run and be managed in the home gateway.

“The participants at the Summit recognised that consumers want to have more complete access to energy use information and be able to better control in-home energy consumption,” said Duncan Bees, HGI CTO.

“Many broadband service providers within HGI believe that the broadband Home Gateway will be the right platform to provide those services, in collaboration with the energy providers. The Summit resulted in a detailed exchange of information regarding the business and technical architecture to deliver those services, and provided a major impetus to our work in this area.”

The Summit concluded that there is a strong need for HGI service providers to consolidate their service and architecture assumptions within the framework of an HGI requirements document, HGI-RWD017-R3: Requirements for Home Energy Management and Control Service. Following the event, representatives of Beywatch and Energy@Home, working through Telefonica TID and Telecom Italia respectively, were nominated as co-editors to the document and steps forward are already being made.

Claudio Borean, Project Manager at Telecom Italia, commented: “Telecom Italia is really pleased to be able to bring results from Energy@Home to HGI, so that consensus requirements on the HG interfaces and services can be determined.

“We learned at the Smart Energy Services Summit that there is a good basis of agreement about the requirements and we feel that by working through HGI, the industry as whole can benefit.”

Pierre Plaza, senior manager for Telefonica TID, which hosted the event at its Madrid facility, said: “Telefonica TID has worked within Beywatch to develop an architecture and services framework for energy efficiency services intended for different stakeholders ranging from residential users up to the utilities. We are really excited about working through HGI to determine common requirements that will help drive these services forward.”

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 further information, please visit www.homegatewayinitiative.org or email [email protected].