14 February 2011 – The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) has today announced the results of its second annual Home Gateway (HG) test event, which highlighted the increasing capabilities of HGs, evaluated against Service Provider (SP) requirements.

Manufacturers within HGI tested HG performance, Quality of Service features, Energy Efficiency, and multi-session handling – all of which continued to progress strongly. HGI member companies also demonstrated outstanding leadership in new capabilities, including software modularity and IPv6 handling.

The software modularity aspect of the test event – introduced for 2010 – proved to be a major success, with eight manufacturers testing their software modularity solutions - according to the 2010 HGI test plan – and four of the eight companies successfully passing all the core tests.

"It's now clear that software modularity is an emerging requirement for Home Gateways," said Andreas Sayegh, Chairman of HGI's Software Execution Environment Task Force. "HGI's test plan, which builds on close collaboration with the OSGi Alliance, allows the HG developers to demonstrate the reliability and performance of modularity features, crucial for SPs deploying this technology. Participant feedback has been tremendously positive, and we will further strengthen the software modularity test plan for 2011."

In the area of Energy Efficiency, the HGI continued its leadership in the practical application of the EU Code of Conduct (CoC) targets for HGs, with the addition of On-State testing, which requires the HG to route live traffic whilst measuring energy consumption.

Oliver Lamparter, Chairman of HGI's Energy Efficiency Task Force, commented: "We found that among participants testing their products for compliance with CoC targets, many were able to meet the EU CoC targets for both 2009/10 and 2011. Overall, the HGI testing will be extremely useful for Service Providers as they evaluate compliance of products against industry requirements on reducing energy draw."

The HGI event also saw significant results in the other functional areas. "For the 2010 test event, we expanded the scope compared to 2009, and added a significant number of new test cases," said Duncan Bees, Chief Technology and Business Officer of HGI. "The results were very informative – for example, showing that IPv6 did not impose a major performance delta compared with IPv4.

All in all, we believe that Service Providers will request to see HGI test event results from HG manufacturers. When core HG attributes are tested before manufacturers bring their products for evaluation to the Service Provider labs, both SP and manufacturer strongly benefit."

The test event was held at TRaC Telecoms & Radio's Hull, UK facility from 24 November to 3 December 2010. More information about the 2010 test event can be found on the HGI web site at http://www.homegateway.org/meetings/testevents_2010.asp.

HGI is now commencing the development of the HGI 2011 test plan, based on agreed goals of the SPs and manufacturers, and intends to agree the first draft of the 2011 test plan at its first quarter 2011 meeting in Bangkok, Thailand.