Global home gateway group adds modularity, energy efficiency

The Home Gateway Initiative, a global organization founded primarily by European telecom operators, this week unveiled new plans to make home gateways more modular, more energy-efficient and more capable of diagnosing problems in the home network.

The HGI, which includes major vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Huawei and Microsoft among its members, doesn’t yet have a US operator in the fold, but its ongoing efforts to define home gateways could well impact what is available here. Founded by nine service providers, including eight European companies and NTT, the HGI sets requirements for home gateways, infrastructure devices and the home network.

Two of its current initiatives are expected to be finalized by the end of 2009 or shortly thereafter and include allowing modular changes to be made to a home gateway to enable new functions to be easily added, said Duncan Bees, the HGI’s chief technology officer, in an interview following his participation in a panel at the Broadband World Forum in Paris.

“The software modularity work we are doing will enable service providers to install applications and modules on the gateways dynamically – actually, to install, uninstall and manage them,” Bees said. “That is a bit of a change. The current gateway is generally a monolithic code, and it is not easy to install new things in a modular way. We have a requirements document from HGI which is setting out technical requests for a software execution environment which will be published, depending on the comments we receive, probably within the quarter, at the earliest.”

Bees said HGI is going to be “relying on some work by other specific technology providers to work with HGI,” but said details about that work have not yet been announced. 

ENERGY SAVINGS
Energy efficiency is another major theme for the HGI, and the organization is addressing it in two ways: by making the gateways themselves more energy efficient and by enabling service providers to use gateways in efforts to control energy usage within the home by other devices, Bees said.

“We hope to stimulate the industry to bring energy efficiency in several phases,” Bees said. “Certainly we first want to make the gateway itself more energy-efficient – there is a major piece of work that is wrapping up soon that looks at the gateway and different hardware elements within the gateway with the goal of not using energy when the gateway is idle. That’s the goal. That’s a very detailed piece of work; we’ll be releasing that in a similar time frame [to software modularity]. We are reviewing that now. The exact timeline will depend on technical requirements and the comments we get back.”

Other work relates to the business analysis phase of determining how service providers can offer smart energy solutions in the home, using the home gateway “as a kind of a control point for controlling energy consumption,” Bees said. “We are looking at what the broadband service provider’s relationship is with the utility service provider. It’s a business analysis issue right now, and we are trying to pull together technical requirements based on these things. We are starting a fair amount of detailed work.”

Finally, the HGI is also looking at making power supplies for home gateways more efficient and as part of that effort, looking to create common power supplies that are not vendor-specific and therefore are more reusable, Bees said. “This is following on work in the wireless world, where similar things have been done for mobile phone power supplies,” he said.
On the remote diagnostics side, the HGI is trying to improve the tools available to service providers by enabling the home gateway to look at the home network topology, detect what devices are connected and provide that information to a help-desk representative when a call comes in. “We want to make sure they have the tools to have some knowledge of what is going on in the network, capturing statistics and monitoring to make sure the data is available to troubleshoot problems,” Bee said. “A piece of that work is getting started in release 3 of HGI.”

The HGI will hold its first ever test event Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, in Lannion, France, enabling both gateway vendors and chip vendors to participate and run test cases focused on quality of service and multi-session support, Lees said. Power consumption will also be tested there. 

There are other issues the HGI is tackling, such as the need to support multiple wireless technologies in the home and the debate over whether the home gateway should be a one-box solution that incorporates the access technology or a two-box model that makes the gateway access-agnostic.

On the latter issue, Bees said the HGI is looking carefully at the next-generation architecture requirements for how fiber and high-speed copper VDSL are terminated into the home and how things such as voice service and WiFi are handled in the home as well.

“These are separate questions that have many aspects to them,” Bees said. “Some are technical, and some are regulatory – we have a lot of business analysis and technology analysis going on in this area. I think we will have to have options in this case. Any group like ours tries to minimize options and limit choices. In this case, however, the service providers in will have to go in different directions, where their business and regulatory regimes are different. So it’s likely we will continue with options of two-box and one-box solutions.”