8 December, 2010 – The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) today announced that its Management Committee (MC) has completed a re-prioritisation of the work programme that will sharpen HGI’s focus on key near-term requirements and result in increased impact for HGI’s work in 2011.

The Service Providers and manufacturers within HGI will come together to review the organisation’s objectives for 2011 at next week’s quarterly meeting in Madrid, taking place from 13-17 December.

Commenting on the 2011 work plan, David Thorne, chief access strategist for British Telecom and member of HGI’s MC and Board, said: “In this time of tightened budgets, it is important to focus on those organisations that bring direct value to their members. We feel that HGI’s work to translate requirements for Quality of Service and Next Generation Access, including Active Line Access requirements, into practical guidelines for manufacturers is very important to the industry.”

Luca Giacomello of Telecom Italia, also a member of the HGI MC and Board, added: “We believe that fast, reliable and relevant results come from HGI thanks to the tight cooperation between operators and manufacturers. For example, in 2011, HGI will publish important specifications supporting home energy monitoring and control services, and that is of major interest to the Service Providers and the manufacturers of equipment supporting those services.”

As well as the 2011 work plan, the Madrid meeting will also review the HGI’s recent test event, which took place in Hull, UK at TRaC Telecoms & Radio’s DSL facility, and discuss the next steps as this testing programme continues to gather momentum.

Duncan Bees, chief technology and business officer at HGI, commented: “This year’s test event focussed on a number of key technical areas for the Home Gateway, for example IPv6, QoS and energy efficiency, with the new area of software modularity receiving a lot of participation.

“We feel that the test event is a major enabling step for the flexible deployment of services on home gateways to residential customers, and we’ll continue to address these requirements together with industry partners.”

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 regarding HGI, please visit www.homegatewayinitiative.org or email [email protected].