New forum brings focus to home networking

The last thing the home networking industry needs is another standards group. But the new ATIS Home Networking Forum hopes to bring some order to the process of standardizing networks within the home, according to its convener, Gale Lightfoot of Cisco Systems. In addition, the new forum will approach home networking from the service provider’s view, as a managed service.

The Home Networking Forum and its work plan were both announced this week by ATIS, which had set up a Home Networking Focus Group that studied this area for more than a year, discovering in the process that more than 34 existing groups were already at work on home networking standards of some kind. The Home Networking Forum is a timely venture for telecom service providers, many of which see home networks as the next frontier for their services and want to make sure they play a role in home networks.

“When we were doing our study last year, we found the need for an umbrella group that would have [its] finger on the pulse of everything going on within the arena defined as a home network,” Lightfoot said. “That way, we could identify any gaps. When you are putting a home network together, you have all sorts of issues you are concerned with – interoperability, discovering the device as well as applications and services, and since we know the transport is IP-based, we have to be concerned with security and DRM [digital rights management]. There was a need for an umbrella group to make sure there weren’t any gaps and, if there were gaps, that they were identified to the appropriate SDO [standards development organization].”

The Home Networking Forum is based on the premise that “the only real home network that will survive is one that is managed,” Lightfoot added. So part of its differentiation from other groups is the focus on management issues, including back office issues for service providers and finding ways “to maintain integrity and accountability,” Lightfoot said.

The three largest US service providers – AT&T, Qwest Communications and Verizon – are represented on the forum as are a number of vendors including Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Sony, Hitachi, ADC, Corning, Haywire, Intrado, Conexant Systems and Widevine.

As part of the announcement of the Home Networking Forum, ATIS also announced an Assessment and Work Plan, to include: A technological assessment from both logical and functional perspectives, encompassing a high-level framework and identification of key building blocks; an in-depth analysis of current standards; and a gap analysis in technical areas such as management, quality of service, security, connection and discovery, remote access and energy consumption. The focus group had already identified 33 standards gaps.