Gateway country

Broadband gateways come home, providing voice options, networking The "smart house" ranks up there with the personal helicopter and the meal-in-a-pill as the epitome of future technology. With one difference: Smart houses are closer to reality than either solo choppers or condensed porterhouse. Residential broadband gateways - including a home networking component - hold the promise of consolidating, distributing and directing the bandwidth needed for video, voice and data services over a range of home devices.

Based largely on the strength of that ability to distribute and share access within the walls of the home, Allied Business Intelligence forecasts that global residential equipment revenues, which should reach $298 million this year, will jump to almost $5 billion in 2005.

Having said that, many elements of the home gateway business model are still up for grabs, including the definition of what qualifies as a residential gateway. The residential gateway must function for distributing Internet access and for offering advanced telephone services, said David Waks, president of System Dynamics.

"Trying to make an IAD - the interface between the cable or telephone plant and the home telephone - as a stand-alone device is quite expensive," he said. "The ideal way to do it is to make it a component of the home gateway."

Broadband access for the PC will come in five flavors - DSL, cable modem, fixed wireless, direct fiber to the home and two-way satellite - and many homes will have two or three of those to choose from in three to five years. Internet access is the first commodity most homeowners want to share among devices; after all, about half of the homes that own Internet-connected PCs have more than one. And unless users want to put those multiple PCs right next to one another, they have to find some way to share that expensive always-on access among those computers.

But broadband access also brings - or will bring soon - the prospect of streaming video, online gaming, digital music downloads and IP telephony, so many gateway makers are looking to hang non-PC broadband devices such as TV sets, radios and telephones off the same networked access.

Many of the gateways coming onto the market have built-in modems and the capacity to serve as LAN base stations for the home, through wireless, power line or phone line networking. To accommodate multiple devices, many also include protocols for addressing devices. For information security, gateways can include firewalls, routing capabilities and packet filtering. Other higher functions are on the way or just showing up in the market: PBX extensions for telecommuters, media server functions that let them serve as audio or video "jukeboxes" for home devices, home security control interfaces and personal portals for members of the household.

For manufacturer Broadband Gateways, spreading advanced voice services throughout the home is the key to the residential gateway market today, and the feature that should appeal most to ISPs and local exchange carriers.

"The need is really for a personal communications system for the home," said Rashid Skaf, marketing and business development vice president for Broadband Gateways. "As long as I have some intelligence that can route traffic to the appropriate points, each person in my home can get their own voice line, their own data connection, their own voice mail. They can customize it for their needs. Now I don't have to pick up the calls that come in for my children or to my home office; I can route those to the appropriate devices. Now I start taking control as a subscriber of what my phone system looks like."

Broadband Gateways uses wireless to supply new phone services while integrating with the legacy "black phones" in a home, which most users will want to keep. The advent of softswitches will require intelligence at the end of the network to make full use of the advanced feature suites they can enable, Skaf said. A wireless handset with a four- or five-line display can allow users to do things such as call transfer with a few touches of a screen.

"All these functions have to be intuitive, simple and easy to use or people won't take advantage of them," Skaf said. He admits that on his current multiline cordless phone, his family transfers calls by walking into the next room and handing off the phone. "We just can't figure out the transfer instructions," he said.

That simplicity is good for the service provider, too. "All the operators we're talking to tell us that they want a unit that they can ship out FedEx to the environment, have the homeowner plug it in, and it works," Skaf said. They also want the ability to manage the gateway unit easily within their networks - especially the capacity for self-provisioning. "Say my in-laws are coming in for the holidays and I want to give them their own phone line," he said. "I can set that up for a week, then tear it down. From the operator's perspective, they gain a week of additional revenue at very little incremental cost."

ShareGate, which produces a home broadband gateway for DSL and is working on one for cable broadband, offers service providers an element management system (EMS) called Gateview for auto-provisioning, remote servicing and automatic alarm and script monitoring.

Gateview also allows service providers to get away from flat-rate charges for access by letting them differentiate and bill for high-bandwidth delivery and access to quality-of-service applications such as video-on-demand, online games and videoconferencing. The ISP also can sell and push integrated access device advertising space using Gateview EMS, opening up a new source of revenue.

"The issue at hand is to make sure that our product can enable those types of functions," said Robin Hays, marketing vice president for ShareGate. "Our EMS allows the gateway to be not only monitored from the central office, but also diagnosed and remotely updated and managed from a remote site. We put the service capacities in there; service providers may not choose to deliver those services immediately. But when they do deliver them - which we believe they will have to do to differentiate themselves - they will have a product in the field that can do so and [they] won't face a lot of stranded cost and need to replace the units."

ShareGate got its start in the telemetry business by producing electrical meters that could be read remotely by the utilities - which meant dealing with the telephone companies. True to its wall-mounted roots, ShareGate originally produced a prototype exterior gateway, but the service providers the company consulted with took a pass. "We went back to the drawing board and came up with a product that avoids a truck roll, is user-installable with absolutely no new wiring and no complex configuration because it's auto-provisioned," Hays said.

The ShareGate DSL 2000 gateway is currently in beta testing, due to enter a field test phase with North Pittsburgh Telephone in conjunction with CopperCom's voice-over-DSL gateway.

Broadband Gateways and ShareGate are two small up-and-comers in the residential gateway market, but the competitive landscape is studded with larger players. Many of these players make cable set-top boxes: Scientific-Atlanta, Ericsson, Motorola and Pace Micro Technology. CableLabs just opened a home networking initiative, which should begin work on specs this fall.

Scientific-Atlanta is pushing its Explorer 6000 set-top as a residential gateway for video, voice and data when used with a home networking component such as a Bluetooth base station. "The Explorer 6000 has an internal cable modem plus a second applications processor," said Dave B. Davies, director for strategic planning and business development of subscriber networks at Scientific-Atlanta. "That allows us to put on a lot of the processing for e-mail, Web browsing and other functions. It's a fraction of the cost of a set-top plus a cable modem plus a [multimedia terminal adapter]."

Within the walls, Scientific-Atlanta thinks wireless is the way to network broadband services. "We like wireless," said Bob C. McIntyre, chief technology officer for Scientific-Atlanta. "We're a member of Ericsson's Bluetooth consortium, and although the $7 version of Bluetooth isn't ready yet, it will be next year, and there will be tens of millions of devices out there."

Wireless home networking via cable-based multiple systems operators may even help the wireless industry solve its tower placement issues. "We're running out of fake trees and wireless nodes, with four or five wireless service providers along every highway, and service still isn't as good as it should be," McIntyre said. He suggests taking a DS-3 or T-1 line off a long-distance Sonet network, dropping it through the front end of an IP-enabled cable system and picking up some of that local wireless traffic.

"Take the load off the wireless network by using the home network and the Explorer set-top platform to take care of a large portion of your front-porch, back-porch, at-your-neighbor's-house and riding-bikes-around-the-neighborhood type of wireless use," he said. "Bandwidth is feeling a lot of pressure, and we've got a lot of bandwidth available."