Motive moves home, links with Alcatel

Motive today announced its Digital Home management product platform that will give carriers a way to manage customer premises equipment such as residential gateways and IP set-top boxes. Additionally, the company announced an agreement with Alcatel under which the two vendors jointly develop and market the software suite.

The Digital Home follows on the company's announcement from last October that it had expanded its certification and interoperability program to include CPE. The addition of the Digital Home suite gives carriers an end-to-end management automation solution that lets them view and control several elements of a residential user's environment including the broadband connection, a residential gateway, multiple Internet-capable devices (computers, TVs, telephones and game consoles), and a home network.

Sanjay Castelino, vice president of industry marketing for Motive, said the impetus for more control over CPE is coming from carriers who realize that to provide a quality experience for users, they must be able to view that equipment as part of the network. "One of the things we've observed in the marketplace is that you can't stick CPE in people's homes and forget about it anymore," he said. "That CPE is now part of a home network, like it or not. If you've got IPTV and an Internet connection you've got a home network."

From the consumer's perspective, he added, if a problem occurs in the service it doesn't matter if the issue resides in the CPE or deeper in the network. At the same time, putting more sophisticated equipment in the residence adds more variables to carriers' network management concerns. It also requires approaching the issue differently.

"When you plug a DSLAM in you expect it to stay plugged in from now until kingdom come," he said. "I know plenty of people who flip the switch on their residential gateway when they go to bed at night. You don't want that to set off alarms."