Home gateway deployments to reach 34mn in 2009, says HGI

June 24, 2008 - The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) is projecting that deployments of managed home gateways will increase from 16.2mn in 2007 to 34mn by 2009, and states that the devices are now a market reality.

“The home gateway is not simply a router, but a service enabler,” commented Milan Erbes, ambassador for the HGI and Business Development and Standardisation Manager for DS2. “The HGI focuses on the home gateway itself, but encompasses also the Home Network Infrastructure Devices as well, providing guidelines on remote access, parental control in the home, performance metrics, quality of service (QoS) and security.”

Key issues that the HGI will be addressing in coming months include support for the small office/home office (SOHO) environment, energy saving, extended QoS, diagnostics, Home Network Infrastructure Devices support, the Home Gateway and Network Termination two-boxes approach for Next Generation Networks, Home Gateway resilience, IPv6 and the evolution of support to IPTV and IMS.

The HGI was founded by nine telecom operators (Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, NTT, Telefonica and Telecom Italia) in 2004, and aims to establish home gateway-related technical and interoperability specifications and provide input to standardisation bodies.