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Can telcos take over your home? * Who's making the kit * How it works * What's next
February 14, 2008
The advanced home gateway is the telco’s foot in the consumer’s door –- and a relatively new class of telecom customer premises equipment (CPE). And the rollout of ultrafast next-generation broadband access networks (such as fiber or VDSL2) carrying triple-play services is focusing a lot of attention on this new adjunct to the digital home.
The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) industry standards group defines a home gateway as “a device that acts as a hub between the home environment and the broadband network. Under the control of the service provider, it simplifies the user experience when utilizing broadband services.” [emphasis added]
This is partly the standard definition of a network gateway – a device that allows two separate or different types of network to interwork –- but, as the italics stress, it introduces a key second aspect, namely allowing the service provider or telco to control the device in various ways. This is partly to hide the technicalities and undoubted complications of IP-based networks and services from the user, and partly to give scope for the offering of improved or new services for competitive differentiation –- and, as always, to cut costs.
The home gateway in simpler forms has been around for some time. Infonetics Research Inc. recognizes three broad categories of these devices that can be arranged in a hierarchy of increasing sophistication through which the industry has moved.
“One is the data modem, which is typically a broadband gateway (both cable and DSL). The next step up would be an integrated access device (IAD), which adds a DSP for analog/digital voice conversion,” says Jeff Heynen, Infonetics' directing analyst for broadband and IPTV. “The third layer up is what we see as the endgame for residential gateways, which is the digital home gateway. This has all the intelligence built in, the TR-069 remote management and provisioning capabilities, QOS, as well as the in-home networking –- the MOCA, HPNA, and that type of connectivity.”
Overall, the general home broadband gateway market is now substantial, currently reaching about $6 billion annually, according to Infonetics estimates. And the increasing impact of IPTV triple-play is clear. For example, Actiontec Electronics Inc. has pointed out that it sold 4 million residential gateways, modems, and routers during its first decade of business, and then 1 million broadband gateways in four months in early 2007, mainly for triple-play IP video applications with Tier 1 and Tier 2 carriers.
This Who Makes What Report is about telco-grade products, not general home networking products with some gateway-type capabilities. By telco grade, we mean devices (frequently customized) that telcos could use long-term as the basis on which to build a presence in the subscriber’s home as the result of an ultrafast broadband rollout. So ADSL2+, VDSL2, fiber, Ethernet, or WiMax WAN interfaces and acceptable remote configuration, maintenance, provisioning, and so on are crucial, as are capabilities for supporting triple-play and IPTV on the service side.
Like previous Light Reading Who Makes What Reports, a key part is a categorized list of vendors that aims to be representative and as complete as practicable, so please email significant corrections or omissions to [email protected].
In addition, the Report aims to provide a guide and overview to this burgeoning area of telecom technology by looking in more detail at what telco home gateways are, why they are important, what the key technologies are, what sorts of products are available, and how they may develop over the next few years.
Here’s a hyperlinked contents list:
Page 2: What’s the Basic Set-Up?
Page 3: Importance of Home Gateways (I)
Page 4: Importance of Home Gateways (II)
Page 6: Standards & Initiatives (I)
Page 7: Standards & Initiatives (II)
Page 8: Interfaces & Structure
Page 9: Players & Products
Page 10: Towards the Future
— Tim Hills is a freelance telecom writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.
Next Page: What’s the Basic Set-Up?
Telcos, cable MSOs, and mobile operators –- and much of the rest of the telecom and consumer electronics industry –- are eagerly redesigning our homes roughly along the following lines:
A nice, fat broadband pipe coming in –- fiber, copper, cable, or wireless
A box or boxes to terminate the telecom connection and to provide all the necessary telecom functions and controls
A box (which may be integrated with some or all of the above) to provide core services (IP, VOIP, IPTV) and features, with user controls
A home network (such as Ethernet, WiFi, PowerLine) to connect all the home devices to the telecom network and service controller
Lots of devices (PCs, mobiles, telephones, TVs, radios, set-top boxes, DVRs, MP3 players, game consoles, network-attached storage) to hang onto the home network and generate lots of traffic
The basic idea of the home gateway in the telco environment is easy to see from Figure 1, which is based on a conceptual case used by the Home Gateway Initiative in its specifications work.The family of four has various communications devices (TVs, audio systems, fixed and mobile telephones, PCs, and CCTV security cameras) scattered around the house and connected on a LAN that forms the home network. This is connected to the home gateway, which is in turn connected to the service provider’s next-generation broadband access network. The crucial point is that both the access network and the home gateway are under the control of the telco or service provider.“One thing that became clear with FTTH, especially, was we were taking the bottleneck out of the access network, but the last 100 feet within the home might become a bottleneck if we weren’t able to manage that network and provide customers the services they expect from a fiber service such as FiOS,” says Tushar Saxena, director of Home Networking Technologies, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ).
This means having a device located in the home with performance and management capabilities approaching those of other elements within the telco’s own access and core networks, and which can use accepted standards to support a suitable LAN and to interwork intelligently with the attached devices.
A motive for all this is to arrive at situations like that of Figure 2, where incoming streaming media or downloads, for example, can be distributed at will around the house, and, similarly, media can be distributed within the house from in-house sources. And, as everything is converged over one combined telco/home network, voice (VOIP) calls, for example, can be received or made on different devices, or switched between them. Multimedia interactions -– such as call or message notifications on TV screens, and so on -– are possible. The range of potential applications is clearly huge, although the initial major one is obvious: triple-play based on IPTV and video.There is currently a range of home-gateway and network environments for such IPTV triple-play services. These depend on the IP broadband delivery mechanism on the WAN side –- such as Fiber to the Home/Premises (FTTH/P), Fiber to the Curb (FTTC), ADSL2+ Pair Bonded, and VDSL2 –- and on the major video-enabled distribution on the LAN side, such as MOCA, HomePlug AV, and HPNA 3.x.
Because different telcos in different parts of the world have very different next-generation broadband approaches and WAN environments, and the in-home LAN environment will vary greatly (U.S. homes tend to have much more pre-installed co-ax than do many European ones, for example), the market for telco home gateways will inevitably be fragmented, despite major, ongoing standardization efforts.
Next Page: Importance of Home Gateways (I)Although broadband home gateways have been an established market for four or five years, there has been a recent acceleration in developments, thanks to the telco interest in multiplay services with IPTV and video.
“Probably about 18 months ago we started to see a lot stronger presence of services being terminated by those telco gateways –- like VOIP services, analog telephony, and the beginnings of some wireless, such as DECT telephony in the European markets,” says Jaime Fink, VP of technology and strategy at 2Wire Inc. “But what we have seen in the last 12 months is the concept of a much more services-oriented gateway that is providing facilities and networking and management for quad-play services.”
As a result, just about every telco or operator of any size is shipping some sort of home gateway, and almost all have moved, or are moving, towards a TR-069-based management system and premises equipment that triple- and quad-play services require in a telco environment.
Infonetics Research’s Heynen agrees, but he stresses that the market is still at a very early stage.
“It really correlates to IPTV deployments right now,” he says. “Obviously, we are still in the very nascent stages of that, and digital home gateways are really strong in Europe at the moment, with Thomson S.A. (NYSE: TMS; Euronext Paris: 18453) and their LiveBox, and here in the U.S., where Actiontec Electronics Inc. has the digital home gateway for Verizon’s FiOS. Outside of those two significant deployments, there isn’t really that much going on yet, although everybody is looking at it.”
Should their triple-play hopes come to fruition, telcos will have a new business model, with the home gateway occupying a central position. The basic approach is that the customer buys the services, and the telco supplies the necessary box to support them, replacing it whenever needed in future, or providing the option of modular expansions (through USB interfaces, for example). It is not envisaged initially in the major telco deployments that customers will shop around to buy their own home gateways by using retail consumer-electronics products, as with current home networks.
This is because such telco home gateways, despite being standards-based, still need tailoring to the requirements of each individual operator, both for network technology and operational reasons, and for commercial and service strategy. And the telco obviously needs to be absolutely certain that the gateway is going to work when it introduces a mass-market rollout, which makes an own-device essential.
Longer term, as standards mature and the various forms of next-generation access networks become much more widespread, and the gateway model becomes mainstream and good operational experience is gained, telcos are likely to become more relaxed about the use of retail products if certification and interoperability regimes are established. But it is important to realize that there can be inherent limits to this. If the telco has decided, for example, to use an outside-mounted integrated ONT/gateway for its FTTH deployment, that is never going to be a retail product.
Chris Bernard, engineering product manager for Zhone Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: ZHNE), points out that, in the North American fiber market, many of the smaller carriers are looking to the bigger carriers to see what they are doing, and then trying to follow suit, but much of the market is still trying to feel its way to what is the best model. Not only does it vary from customer to customer, but also by subscriber type. A single-family unit is handled differently from a multi-dwelling unit, which is handled differently from a small business or a medium-sized business.
“So there are a lot of challenges to get the right product mix to be able to fill as many holes as possible,” Bernard says. “With our [fiber] zNID, the goal was to make it as flexible as possible so that we would be able to meet the needs of the customers as they came along. But no matter how flexible anyone builds a product, the next customer you come across is likely to ask for something that you have never heard of before. That is just the way of the market.”
There is an obvious interplay between the consumer electronics industry and the introduction of devices supplied and managed by operators. These have to be able to interoperate with consumer devices –- new-generation DECT phones, digital cameras, set-top boxes, and audio equipment via WiFi, for example. Standards making that connectivity work will give consumers the flexibility to buy different types of equipment to attach to the gateway.
However, connectivity alone is not enough. Besides Internet access, providers need to make more money via managed services that will increasingly include those delivered to consumer devices. Dante Iacovoni, Tilgin AB 's marketing director, argues that operators are launching services and applications that they initially certify for one or two different types and models of consumer devices, because they know the service is going to work with them.
“They can’t afford to have a whole bunch of headaches with people taking off-the-shelf equipment,” he says. “However, standards within DLNA and UPnP will enable operators to later offer their services over a greater number of consumer devices that customers will be able to buy in retail shops.”
Overall, the consequences for a range of vendors of the new telco service model could be considerable.
Next Page: Importance of Telco Home Gateways (II)The wireline angle
A significant point for wireline telcos is thus that the home gateway potentially becomes an intelligent service node placed in the home. All IP-based communications will pass through it, and the device will be the last component in the operator’s network. This means that it becomes a competitive tool with which to escape the bit-pipe effect.
Telcos are very conscious that Internet companies such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), YouTube Inc. , and Facebook have been very successful in providing attractive and compelling services that they have been able to monetize. Even triple-play offerings may run the risk of rapidly becoming largely commoditized, while an intelligent service node could provide longer-term differentiation.
“The home gateway of tomorrow –- and the services gateway, as I would call it –- is yet another platform where our applications can reside,” says Verizon’s Saxena. “The PC is a little bit messy. It has a consumer-friendly operating system, but that is not necessarily where you want to install your time-critical high-availability applications. An intelligent home gateway is probably a more robust platform where the same applications could sit.”
In particular, such a gateway would provide a runtime environment for third-party applications, thereby opening an entirely new market for application service providers (ASPs). Unlike today’s home PC, it would be a much more controlled environment for applications, with a robust platform that has been well tested and suffers from no interference from other customer-installed applications. This would mark a move towards technology appliances, relieving the customer entirely from IT tasks and making the services much more transparent.
The 3G femtocell angle
Another factor pushing the home gateway into prominence is 3G femtocell technology. From the perspective of a telco home gateway, femtocells are now pretty well standardized as a technology, thus boosting their attractiveness as an integrated capability.
“In most cases, the 3G femtocell set people have been talking about is compliant to the 3GPP Release 6 for local-area cell class -- this defines a very small cell that has a power level that relaxes some of the criteria from macro and micro cells,” says Simon Albury, general manager of UMTS at Airvana Inc. “We expect to see a wide range of femto CPE. We are very bullish about this. The key thing is the price to the consumer. You may well find that a lot of operators decide to provide the femtocell solution at near-zero cost to the consumer.”
The initial attraction of femtocells is to mobile operators, especially those offering broadband access as well. The basic logic is that femtocells put the operator’s services directly within the subscriber home for the first time, encourage service convergence and usage (the mobile 3G handset being convenient for voice, texting, and the interactive Web 2.0 world), and help to roll out a more comprehensive 3G infrastructure in which, gloriously, the customer pays directly for the backhaul and the base station.
This sounds like a no-brainer, and there is unsurprisingly huge interest in the mobile world. Some operators, such as Vodafone Portugal , have already taken the plunge into femtocells. Most, however, are still working on their business cases, so the market is not going to explode overnight.
According to Airvana's Albury, integration of femtocell capability into home gateways actually eases some technical issues, because the designer knows the precise characteristics of the gateway involved, rather than having to work with an unknown device. So any potential RF interference problems from WiFi interfaces could be eliminated, for example, and the gateway’s integrated TR-069 remote management facility can be used to manage the femtocell device.
Further, there are obvious service-convergence advantages. Some gateway vendors are looking to include home-automation features, so femtocell integration would simplify access to, say, a home security or heating system controller from the customer’s handset.
However, not all telco home-gateway vendors are yet convinced that there is an imminent need for femtocell capability within their devices, although the longer-term potential looks positive. Reasons include the current high cost of femtocell chipsets (around $200, according to one vendor) compared to the few dollars for WiFi -- which can also be used with dualmode handsets and are becoming widely available in many different types of CPE. The vendors also cite a lack of demand from their operator customers.
The integration of femtocell capability thus looks like more of a business than a technology decision for telcos. Certainly, the gateway should be architecturally able to support femtocells, but it may not be cost effective to include the functionality for an initial home gateway that is going to be supplied to all subscribers to a multiplay service, if a considerable proportion of them do not want a femtocell-based quad-play service. A later femtocell add-on option could make much more sense financially. So mainstream home-gateway adoption may still be some years away
The utility angleTelcos and burglars are not the only ones interested in getting into our homes. The power utilities in many parts of the world are evaluating or implementing schemes to install advanced metering systems in customers’ homes to promote the efficient use of energy. The basic idea is that a networked intelligent metering device can both monitor the home’s power usage in real time and interact with the utility’s pricing and billing system to obtain real-time cost information that could be used to control home appliances and to notify the customer of potential waste.
At the simplest level, this could be just through an information display to warn the customer that power is expensive at this time and that they are using a lot of it. A more sophisticated approach is for high-usage appliances to be given the intelligence to use the real-time information to time-shift operation within certain limits. For example, a gas boiler might decide to preheat the hot-water tank now, because gas prices have fallen but are expected to rise in a couple of hours.
Currently, utilities are generally using a mix of telco backhaul from a local access point and low-speed packet-over-powerline technologies to connect to intelligent meters –- direct telecom alternatives such as putting a GPRS capability into every intelligent meter tend to be prohibitively expensive. However, the widespread installation of intelligent telco home gateways supporting home networks could lead to more sophisticated options that involve both the utility and the telco within the home.
“Where I see the intersection between what a utility does and what a telco does is that there are devices the utility may own and manage in your home, such as storage heaters today,” says Jeff Lund, VP for business development and corporate marketing at Echelon . “The question is what you do with devices that aren’t owned and managed by the utility, but may be influenced by information the utility is providing. That, to me, is the home owner’s network.”
Since many of these devices, such as TVs and PCs, will be on the home network anyway, a gateway between the home network and the utility network would provide such a facility. Although it could be a simple separate device, it could also be integrated as a function within the telco gateway itself, allowing both Internet access and significant processing power to enhance the service.
“There would be interesting applications that do require more bandwidth,” says Lund. “To send rate information requires trivial bandwidth. But if you wanted to let someone download charts of consumption last month versus consumption this month, or how their consumption compared with the local average, you need more bandwidth and potentially more processing power. That would be better done through some sort of telecom gateway.”
Next Page: What Telcos Want From a Home GatewayA simple model of a telco home gateway comprises the telco WAN interface/termination on one side, home LAN interface/termination on the other, and a lot of functionality in between to make it work. To qualify as a home gateway for the purposes of this report, the core in-between function is a sophisticated broadband router/Ethernet-switch/bridge, backed up by telco-style remote configuration and management. Also, the product family on the WAN side should extend from at least ADSL2+ and VDSL2 interfaces because of the telco TV and ultrafast fiber interest.
So, a sample integrated fiber GPON-based home gateway would comprise GPON ONT, broadband router, battery backup, and media controller.
Additionally, on the LAN side the gateway may feed into another device (typically a set-top box) to provide the multimedia functions and services, such as IPTV, VOD and media storage; or these can all be provided in one integrated gateway package.
From the telco point of view, essential home-gateway capabilities and functions are:
Basic broadband transport and networking
Support for various services, such as VOIP and IPTV, with appropriate hardware interfaces
QOS and traffic management (for example, via multiple VLAN support for different traffic streams and assigning different services to different LAN ports)
Remote and automated provisioning, management, and troubleshooting
Security, authentication, and billing
User interface
Various additional functions can enhance the device and the services it can support, thereby making it more appealing to the consumer. For example:
Disk (or other) storage for downloaded video and other material
Hardware interfaces and applications support for common residential IT devices, such as digital cameras, MP3 players, games controllers, keyboards, and TV clickers
Applications software for Web access, photo viewing, and so on
Essentially, this aspect of the home gateway is the flexibility to build it as far as desired by the telco into a home IT hub and multimedia control center.
“Remote manageability is the first and most basic of all capabilities, because the gateway is the last component in the operator’s network. It needs to be managed in the same way as all the other devices and equipment that is in their network,” says Tilgin’s Iacovoni. “Remote management offers the operator the ability to be in full control of this equipment, enabling them to provide a better quality service and at the same time keep their operational costs to a minimum. Within remote manageability there are also aspects for automating and provisioning of the equipment and services, as well as functionality that can help offload an operator’s helpdesk.”
Much of this is about reducing operations and customer support costs as much as possible through automation and remote configuration and troubleshooting. Additionally, it embraces extensibility. By using field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) designs, telcos can upgrade firmware and software remotely, without having to roll a truck to fix any problems, and without the customer even having to know that something has been improved or corrected on the gateway. And remote management allows new services to be offered from a flexible platform.
An example of this flexibility is Verizon’s FiOS TV multi-room DVR service, Home Media DVR, which allows different DVR-stored programs to be simultaneously viewed on up to three TVs –- the DVR set-top box and two remote boxes –- connected to the LAN with bookmark (start a show in one room, pause and continue viewing in another room) as well as trick-play control. Bundled with the service is an application called Media Manager that allows the customer to send image and music files from a LAN-connected computer to the TV or home theater. Customers can buy this service on installation or add it later, as Verizon can activate it remotely at the customer's request. The Media Manager software is downloaded and installed by the customer through the LAN and the FiOS broadband connection.
Verizon also provides an example of how remote management can help a telco transition from the initial operations focus of rolling out a new fiber network to concentrating on the service focus. Says Saxena: “With a fiber service at such high speeds there are things you discover in the home network that you don’t expect. I am glad that we put TR-069 in so that we can remotely resolve home-network issues and get the customer up and running quickly. We are getting new types of calls from customers than we used to before on DSL.”
An example is that every FiOS gateway includes WiFi built-in and preconfigured with a passkey for its wireless security, which is switched on by default. In contrast, with DSL, customers had the option to buy their own wireless gateways and often did not bother to enable security. So many FiOS customers were unfamiliar with passkeys, and easily forgot them, giving rise to a lot of help desk calls. Verizon has developed its IVR system to allow customers to reset their keys or reboot the router automatically by remote management.
QOS and traffic-management capabilities are essential for supporting value-added services above best-effort data; for example, multiple delay-sensitive voice, video, and gaming streams mixed with other traffic such as data downloads.
Stronger security is also crucial, as there are a lot of additional techniques that have to be used in the network to providing a much stronger degree of security and a trust environment compared to the use of simple, untrusted retail devices such as the basic combined DSL modem, router, and WiFi gateway of a few years ago.
“In the IPTV realm, the gateway is the only thing protecting the service provider’s network from various in-network attacks that may be coming from people on their network. So they are trusting these gateways as a policy entity now that is part of their end-to-end network,” says 2Wire’s Fink. “It’s very similar to what the mobile networks had to do with SIM cards and things like that. We have had to create those techniques to provide the carrier-grade strength of authentication.”
Next Page: Standards & Initiatives (I)This being telecom, there are oodles of standards and industry initiatives and alliances clustered around home gateways. These include:
Broadband Forum
Home Gateway Initiative (HGI)
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA)
UPnP (Universal Plug &Play) Forum
The motivation for standards is the same as in any other area of telecom technology, but it has been given particular impetus because telcos have begun deploying mass-market triple-play services but have not been able to rely on off-the-shelf boxes. This has led to a lot of very cost effective.
DSL Forum
This large and long-standing industry organization, despite its focus on DSL-based broadband, has considerably extended its interests over the years from defining basic standard DSL architectures and interoperability testing to include matters of mass-market broadband servicing, such as autoconfiguration, flow-through provisioning, and IPTV, and generally to facilitate the efficient delivery and management of advanced IP services to the customer. To a fair extent, the Forum provides some key overarching technology standards to which the other home-gateway standards bodies relate their own work.
The DSL Forum works through an ongoing series of Technical Reports that provide technical specifications and standards. Several are directly relevant to home gateways, including:
TR-068 (Version 2, March 2005, and Issue 3, November 2006) – Base Requirements for an ADSL Modem With Routing describes the “base requirements for an ADSL and ADSL 2+ modem with embedded router functionality that can be deployed through North American retail stores and then configured for customer use by service providers.” It is based on TR-124 Functional Requirements for Broadband Residential Gateway Devices.
TR-069 (May 2004, and Amendment 1, November 2006) – CPE WAN Management Protocol specifies a protocol that allows communication between a CPE and an Auto-Configuration Server (ACS) for secure auto-configuration as well as other CPE management functions within a common framework. Capabilities include:
Auto-configuration and dynamic service provisioning
Software/firmware image management
Status and performance monitoring
Diagnostics
It’s envisaged that CPEs using TR-069 would include home gateways, voice-capable gateways, set-top boxes, and wireless routers, for example. An important point is that TR-069 is not limited to DSL-based broadband, and can be applied to any broadband access technology, including fiber. In this role it seems to be succeeding, and is being widely implemented by many different vendors.
TR-098 (Issue 1, September 2005, and Amendment 1, November 2006) – Internet Gateway Device Data Model for TR-069 does what it says on the tin, defining the Internet Gateway Device data model for the CPE WAN Management Protocol.
TR-111 (Release 1, December 2005) – Applying TR-069 to Remote Management of Home Networking Devices is a two-part document that (a) allows an ACS managing a device to identify the associated gateway through which that device is connected; and (b) allows an ACS to initiate a TR-069 session with a device that is operating behind a NAT gateway. The point is to extend TR-069 to enhance its ability to remotely manage devices that are connected via a LAN through an Internet gateway -- for example, VOIP phones, media set-top boxes, and gaming systems.
TR-104 (Release 1, September 2005) – Provisioning Parameters for VOIP CPE defines the data model for VOIP CPE.
TR-106 (September 2005) – Model Template for TR-069 Enabled Devices specifies a generic data model applicable to all TR-069-enabled devices.
TR-124 (Release 2, December 2006) – Functional Requirements for Broadband Residential Gateway Devices specifies “a superset of requirements for broadband Residential Gateway devices that are capable of supporting a full suite of voice, data, broadcast video, video on demand, and two-way video applications in broadband networks.”
Like TR-069, TR-124 isn’t specific to DSL, as it considers other WAN interfaces than DSL, such as Ethernet and GPON. Even TR-068, which is limited to ADSL/2+, has a huge amount of generality when it comes to IP capabilities (router, firewall, and so on).
Next Page: Standards & Initiatives (II)Home Gateway Initiative (HGI)
This is an international telco initiative, launched by Belgacom SA (Euronext: BELG), BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT), Orange (NYSE: FTE), KPN Telecom NV (NYSE: KPN), Telia Company , NTT Communications Corp. (NYSE: NTT), Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF), and Telecom Italia (TIM) in December 2004, but now expanded to over 70 members, including many vendors. It works on technical and interoperability specifications, and provides input to other standards bodies. Currently, it is producing a series of technical releases to specify requirements and architectural aspects of telco home gateways.
Release 1 (July 2006) – Home Gateway Technical Requirements presents the entire set of requirements for the Home Gateway and defines mechanisms for the integration of the gateway with home devices and networks, services, public network interfaces, and servers.
Release 2, after being released as an internal HGI publication, was merged into the existing Release 1 to improve overall readability, thus creating a Revised Release 1 (December 2007), now available on the HGI Website. The revised Release 1 provides increased support to IMS, fixed/mobile convergence, plug-and-play, QOS, remote management and troubleshooting, and additional mechanisms for end-to-end delivery of broadband services. In addition, the revision includes UPnP, DLNA, SIP, wireless hotspot guest access, connections admission control, and parental control. This version now forms the basic specification document for the requirements (there are about 500 of them) for home gateways for residential customers.
A future release will cover the growing need for supporting the SOHO (small-office/home-office) market, where there is currently no dedicated gateway product. The HGI aims to produce a specification for this, and also to increase the functionality for supporting IMS and IPTV. It is also working on more specialized requirements for gateways.
“You can have a network termination separated from the gateway, for example,” says Paolo Pastorino, HGI's CTO. "In fiber-based architectures, you might have the optical network termination (ONT) in your basement already doing QOS and management, so the gateway doesn’t have to do certain things. And the definition of that box might be slightly different from one connected to a DSL network. In principle, this approach can be applied to WiMax architectures, if needed.”
Pastorino sees widespread support for the HGI standards, estimating that “more than three-quarters of the features that we have defined are agreed by the vast majority of vendors and operators.” However, the HGI does not do conformance testing, and, owing to the range of options within the standards, their structure and the legacy platforms that the telcos have in place, it is impossible to make current RFI/RFQs require 100 percent compliance to them.
“We now have a more comprehensive and wide document, and definitely operators are encouraged to use most of it, but what they are usually doing is taking blocks from the standard or replicating the same mechanisms in their RFIs, although perhaps compiled in a slightly different way,” says Pastorino.
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA)
The DLNA is concerned more with the home-network side of the gateway, and focuses on developing an interoperability framework for networked media devices within the home. Its Home Networked Interoperability Guidelines (version 1.0) specifies a baseline interoperable platform for digital media servers and digital media players; and the subsequent Optional Media Formats Addendum supports 11 additional media formats for imaging, audio, and video. Version 1.5 (2006) included mobile, handheld, and print applications, and also link protection guidelines to protect commercial content as it flows between devices. The base technology is IP and UPnP (see following and Table 1). The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has accepted (October 2007) DLNA Guidelines as international standards.
Table 1: Building Blocks Used in DLNA Interoperability Guidelines
Aspect | Building Blocks |
Media Format | MP3, JPEG, LPCM, MPEG2, MPEG4 AAC LC, AVC/H.264 |
Device Discovery, Control, and Media Management | UPnP AV 1.0 / UPnP Device Architecture 1.0 |
Media Transport | HTTP (mandatory) and RTP (optional) |
Network Stack | IPv4 Protocols |
Network Connectivity | Wired: 802.3i, 802.3u. Wireless: 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth |
The impact of the DLNA on home gateways is probably more towards the media functions that vendors might integrate into these devices. For example, the DLNA guidelines recognize three broad categories of device: Home Network Devices (HNDs), Mobile Handheld Devices (MHDs), and Home Interoperability Devices (HIDs). A typical HND is a digital media server, which provides media acquisition, recording, storage, sourcing, and content-protection enforcement, while a typical HID is a mobile network connectivity function, which bridges between the MHD and the HND network connectivities. It’s not difficult to see such functions popping up in an all-singing, all-dancing home gateway.
Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Forum
The UPnP defines itself as “an industry initiative designed to enable simple and robust connectivity among consumer electronics, intelligent appliances, and mobile devices from many different vendors.” Like the DLNA, the UPnP will affect the way consumer electronic devices network and interact within the home (and elsewhere), and so will ultimately affect the design of home gateways. The basic idea is to enable ad hoc peer-to-peer networking (so autodiscovery and no configuration) between devices in an open architecture based on such Internet protocols as IP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, and XML –- for example, device contracts are declarative, expressed in XML and communicated via HTTP. So the UPnP Forum is developing standards for describing device protocols and XML-based device schemas for device-to-device interoperability, as described in UPnP Device Architecture 1.0 (July 2006)
Next Page: Interfaces & StructureThe most obvious characteristics of a home gateway are its interfaces, as they determine its basic connectivity, on which everything else is built. They also form a practical means of classifying gateways. The interfaces take two forms: those on the input side of the gateway (the WAN side) and those on the output side (the LAN side or home side).
The WAN side
Gateways come in three forms: those that include an access network termination, those that do not, and those that give the operator a choice. The choice depends on the access network environment in which the vendor and telco envisage using the gateway, and on factors such as cost, operations, and service strategy. These often vary considerably in different parts of the world. For example, in Europe and Asia it is common to terminate FTTP fiber within the customer premises, whereas it is more common in the U.S. to terminate the fiber on the outside of the home, connecting to the internal gateway by another medium, such as Ethernet, or connecting directly to the home network, say, by HPNA, if the ONT integrates the gateway functions as well.
Typically, gateways for use with ADSL or VDSL access networks integrate the DSL modem and termination functions so that the customer can plug these devices straight into the home RJ11 phone socket, giving a very simple and familiar installation.
In FTTH scenarios, the situation can be more complicated. Often, the telco will use a separate ONT (perhaps mounted externally or in a basement) and then use Category 5 Ethernet to connect the ONT to the inside gateway, so the gateway will have a 10/100 Mbit/s RJ45 WAN-side interface. Category 5 Ethernet distribution is commonly used in this way to provide high-speed broadband in multidwelling units, for example, as well as within single dwellings with a separate ONT and gateway.
Since Ethernet interfaces of this type are so cheap, they are often included in DSL gateways anyway, to maximize potential market coverage by the vendor. This creates a common product that would work in a fiber-fed environment via Ethernet, or just plug into the phone socket to train up on DSL. Many telcos like this capability, as it reduces stockholding costs.
Another FTTH alternative, more common in Europe and parts of Asia than in the United States, is to use direct point-to-point optical Ethernet over multimode or singlemode fiber, so gateways with these WAN interfaces are available. A further approach is to integrate the ONT for access technologies such as GPON and EPON into a single externally mounted fiber gateway unit. However, this is somewhat of a niche approach in North America currently.
“The market is not seeing much in the way of fiber gateways. The main deployment model now is a sort of dumbed-down ONT providing a fat pipe to a residential gateway with an RJ-45 10/100-baseT uplink inside the home,” says Zhone’s Bernard. “However, putting the gateway functionality into the fiber box potentially gives the network operator a lot more visibility into the home and the customer’s network, which allows them to have more control over the customer.”
However, standards are an issue when considering integrating optical interfaces into home gateways, according to the HGI’s Pastorino.
“We have discussed having a fiber interface natively built into the gateway. But the problem is that currently the fiber architectures deployed are not homogeneous,” he says. “Some are deploying purely Ethernet over fiber, some GPON, EPON, or point-to-point fiber, and it is not yet clear what will be the direction of the majority. So we have decided that currently in the Release on the WAN side you can have an Ethernet port that can be used to connect to a media converter from fiber to Ethernet.”
The LAN side
The LAN side of the gateway can be pretty varied, too. Apart from the long-established forms of wired and wireless Ethernet, there are a number of home-specific networking technologies, as well as newer higher-speed forms of wireless Ethernet that have obvious applications in the home. Interfaces thus include:
Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA)
Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HomePNA)
HomePlug Powerline Alliance
USB 2.0 slave and host ports
Telephony interfaces; DECT, FXS, ISDN
Wired Ethernet
Wireless Ethernet 802.11a/b/g/n.
Generally, telcos aim to give customers a choice of which LAN-side interfaces they use, although they may have a preferred or default option for the gateway and own-supplied attached service appliances, such as set-top boxes. Much will depend on national environments and telco technology approaches. Wired LANs are usually favored over wireless for streaming media and for avoiding issues of coverage and interference, although the continuing improvement in wireless technology through intelligent antenna systems and the like should ultimately redress the balance.
MoCA has obvious attractions in markets with a high cable penetrations, for example, while HomePNA can provide a neat solution for linking and powering an externally mounted integrated ONT/gateway with the inside of a home –- via the existing phone line. HomePlug has the obvious attraction of being automatically available at every electrical device in the home, but its deployment in the U.S. is complicated by the common use of two-phase electrical power in the home.
Structure
There are lots of ways of designing a telco home gateway, even with the help of standards, so there is no single model. Figure 3 shows a very generic structure, typical of current standards work by the HGI.The gateway operates essentially as an enhanced router and bridge, allowing operation at Layers 2 or 3, or as a hybrid of both (for example, with two separately connected LANs, one at Layer 2, the other at Layer 3). The point of this is that, although routed operation at Layer 3 is the natural mode for the gateway because it separates the access and home networks –- so firewall, NAT, QOS, service termination, SIP proxy, and so on are needed –- some telcos currently require Layer 2 operation end-to-end. However, there are issues, such as with broadcast packets, that mean that the gateway is unlikely to implement Layer 2 capabilities in their entirety.
The two other key components of the gateway’s functional structure shown in Figure 3 are the remote management and QOS systems, both of which are accessible to the telco to allow all the gateway, home network, and service control mentioned earlier. But there will be many other functions as well, such as maintenance and performance monitoring, security policies and authentication, and device discovery.
Next Page: Players & ProductsThis Who Makes What Report is concerned mainly with the top layer of the home-gateway market, as defined in the introduction. So generally it omits large numbers of vendors (many well known) that concentrate on the lower layers and don’t currently have much involvement with the service-termination and service-oriented gateways with sophisticated remote management capabilities that big telcos are now beginning to use with their next-generation access networks. The devices we're honing in on are, in principle, sold first to telcos according to their specific requirements, and later are resold to service subscribers –- a very different market from the familiar retail computer stores supplying generic networking devices to home users.
Nevertheless, there is bound to be a certain amount of crossover, particularly as telcos and service providers generally are going to offer different bands of services, and obviously won’t want to have to supply (or force the user to buy) an expensive tailored box that is too functional for the lower or more restricted categories of service. So it is not hard to see a market for generic equipment continuing (smaller service providers might hope so), but in a less prolific form than today’s.
Almost by definition, the players interested in the top-layer, telco home gateways have product ranges that fall into only a very few areas. These are principally:
Home gateways – the complete/integrated device, with femtocell gateways as a growing adjunct and subcategory
Management systems for home gateways
Software – protocol stacks and applications software for home gateways
Silicon – home-gateway network processors and other specialized chipsets
Subsystems – other components and subsystems, such as routers and hardware firewalls
Table 2 classifies nearly 40 vendors of home gateways and/or management systems, as these form the main high-level products or end systems. It also indicates the main WAN interfaces supported by these vendors' product ranges. This provides one of the fundamental distinctions between vendors, since it determines which kinds of next-generation access network will work with their products. Something similar could be done on the LAN side but is less clear-cut, because most of these vendors support most of the common LAN interfaces.
Table 2: Telco Home Gateway Vendors
Vendor | Home gateways | Femtocell gateways | Management systems | ADSL2+ | VDSL2 | FTTP use | Optical Ethernet | Electrical Ethernet | GPON | EPON | Cable | WiMax |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||
Yes (development) | ||||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||||
Yes | ||||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
It’s important to be clear on what vendors mean when they describe their home gateways as supporting FTTH or FTTP, indicated in the FTTP use column of Table 2, as vendors differ in whether their FTTP home gateways actually support the optical network termination (ONT) functions (for example, for GPON). Some do, and are noted as such in Table 2 by the specific optical technology supported, but many others do not and simply provide broadband inputs (typically Category 5 electrical Ethernet) that can take the output from a suitable ONT.
Not surprisingly, vendors in the home gateway category dominate this Who Makes What Report. However, the industry is undergoing some changes, and vendors specializing in providing software platforms for OEMs for home gateways have appeared, for example, Jungo and Wipro Technologies. There has also been a recent flurry of activity with silicon/VLSI vendors, such as Applied Micro Circuits, Cavium Networks, TranSwitch, and Teknovus, to implement the software stacks in hardware, a further sign of the growing maturity of the technology and industry. Further, the product roadmaps for the network processors used in home gateways show a move to multicore and multithreaded devices, significantly increasing processor power.
Because the number of vendors in these categories is much smaller than those in Table 2, it is more convenient to put them into a simple list, as follows:
Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (Nasdaq: AMCC) – silicon
Actiontec Electronics Inc. – subsystems
BroadLight Inc. – silicon
Cavium Inc. (Nasdaq: CAVM) – silicon
Conexant Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CNXT) – silicon
Echelon – software
Ikanos Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: IKAN) – silicon
Intellon Corp. (Nasdaq: ITLN) – silicon
Jungo Ltd. – software
TeamF1 Inc. – software
Teknovus Inc. – silicon
TranSwitch Corp. (Nasdaq: TXCC) – silicon
Wipro Ltd. (NYSE: WIT) – software
The home-gateway vendors listed are essentially on the telecom side of the industry, even if some are offering in-home consumer devices, such as set-top boxes. The process of starting with a telco device and building it upwards into a home IT hub family can be, and is being, applied in reverse, and vendors of existing home devices such as games consoles and set-top boxes are also using these devices as home gateways, although not in the full telco sense covered in this report.
It’s worth pointing out that, in contrast to the full service integration supported in principle by a telco home gateway offering triple-play IPTV, a conventional cable home gateway is somewhat different, as the existing TV service is split off before the gateway. So there is not full service integration via the gateway. However, the gateway can still be managed and configured remotely by the cable operator, so this report classifies it as a telco-grade home gateway.
Home gateway capabilities and features
Although vendor and telco diversity make it simplistic to talk of a typical current telco home gateway, the following list, conflated from several vendors’ product ranges, gives a broad idea of the capabilities and features to be found in some or many of today’s products:
LAN-side interfaces:HomePNA, Ethernet, wireless (802.11b/g/n), USB, and specifically for video (IPTV) networking: MOCA, HomePlug AV, HPNA 3.x. Netopia 7000 VDSL2 Gateway Series offers also Plastics Optical Fiber (POF).
WAN-side interfaces: Devices for ADSLx, VDSL2, FTTP (delivering electrical Ethernet output into the gateway). Some devices have direct optical interfaces for Ethernet (single or multimode) or are integrated into a PON ONT (typically GPON). It is worth noting that the GPON world sometimes refers to devices as being ONTs even when they clearly contain at least some gateway functions.
Small size and low weight: To reduce the telco’s storage and handling costs.
Simple self-install: Essentially plug in and switch on.
Simple GUI for customer self management: For example, to allow the customer to check easily on the status of the broadband connection, and who is using the home network.
TR-069 compliant backend management system: To handle things like service provisioning, upgrading firmware, networking configuration, and troubleshooting.
Double-play, triple-play, and quad-play devices and components: That is, VOIP/broadband, VOIP/broadband/IPTV, or VOIP/broadband/IPTV/mobile devices or complete systems. These can include set-top boxes, network extenders, and dualmode mobile phones.
Integrated or separate routers: The router is the key networking subsystem. While vendors usually integrate this into the home gateway, others offer the option of separate routers, particularly if higher performance and functionality are required (but this would typically be in a small-business or SOHO context).
Personalized subscriber messages and promotions via user control interface: The idea is to allow the telco/service-provider to offer real-time information, promotions, and premium services to the subscriber, and so enhance its customer-relationship management.
Auto-prioritization of streaming traffic: To maintain QOS of time-sensitive LAN/WAN traffic without the need for end-user configuration.
Multiple, fast and flexible (Ethernet) LAN ports: This allows the service provider to configure the gateway to deliver different traffic types (such as streaming video, online gaming and data) to different LAN ports for purposes of QOS. A pretty impressive raw network performance is now possible from some fiber-based home gateways –- 1 Gbit/s GEPON combined with multiple simultaneous and symmetrical 100 Mbit/s Ethernet LAN ports, for example. Gigabit LAN switching may just show that telcos can’t win –- you think 50 Mbit/s is broadband? But if users are going to be swapping gigabyte video files around the home and to their friends in any numbers...
Range of integrated user applications: Examples are Web access, parental controls, home networking, VOIP, NetMeeting, MSN Messenger, FTP, QuickTime, mIRC, Real Player, CuSeeMe, VPN. A point here is that the gateway router can be autoconfigured to allow third-party applications to be handled without intervention of the user.
User security features: Such as integral stateful inspection firewall with NAT, and blockage of denial-of-service, port scanning, and Web spoofing attacks, with logging of potential security breaches to a local cache or remote server.
Filtering of Web content: This can be offered at various levels, from simple locally maintained lists to more advanced, dynamic, Web-based subscription services for access to an online store of characterized URLs, which is continuously updated and interacts with a policy mechanism based on the user identification.
Ruggedized device for external wall mounting: This is to make the gateway easier for telco technicians to access for truckroll installations (such as are required for VDSL2 FTTC or pure FTTP deployments), and also avoids issues with DSL signal degradation that may occur if existing internal wiring is used to terminate to the home gateway. An external location near to an existing phone network interface device (NID) can also make it easier to connect the external home gateway’s VOIP service to the existing internal phone wiring, which can also be used to power the external gateway. By making the device part of the operator’s broadband network, the customer is also relieved of the responsibilities of maintenance, repair, and upgrades. One refinement is for the electronics to be housed in a modular cover, allowing field upgrades to take place without removing the cover or rewiring.
[Products on which the above list is based are provided by Actiontec Electronics Inc. , Allied Telesis Inc. , Entone Inc. , Motorola/Netopia Inc. , Pirelli Broadband Solutions , Ruckus Wireless Inc. , SMC Networks Inc. , Thomson S.A. (NYSE: TMS; Euronext Paris: 18453), and 2Wire Inc. ]
Table 3 gives further details of two typical ADSL2+ and VDSL2 products for the important areas of remote management and QOS and traffic management.
Table 3: Examples of Home Gateway Remote Management & QOS Capabilities
Capability | Example product |
Remote management | Motorola Netopia 7000 VDSL2 gateway: TR-069 Remote Management; Remote and Local Management Options via Web UI (HTTP) and CLI (Telnet); 2 Level Password Protected Access; Statistic and Log Reporting, Remote Syslog Support; 7-Layer Diagnostics; SNMP v1 & v2; Utilities: Ping, Traceroute, Reverse DNS. Pirelli Broadband Solutions Discus ADSL2+ DRG A226M: DSL Forum TR-069; TFTP client for remote firmware upgrade; Diagnostics and logs; Telnet with CLI; Web server with Admin/User configuration Pages |
QOS / traffic management | Motorola Netopia 7000 VDSL2 gateway: VGx Virtual Gateway Technology; Diffserv - Differentiated Services; IEEE 802.1p - Priority Bits; IEEE 802.1q - VLAN Tagging; IGMP v2/v3 Snooping/Forwarding with Fast Leave; TR-111 Support. Pirelli Broadband Solutions Discus ADSL2+ DRG A226M: Traffic shaping (ATM layer); Priority-based scheduling (up to 8 queues, max 4 per PVC); DSCP/TOS remarking |
Next Page: Towards the FutureHome gateways are part of a long-term trend to centralize many home resources, such as telecom services, digital media, and residential telemetry and control. As the recent 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas emphasized, consumer digital electronics is about flat-panel display screens everywhere, IP enabling and networking of just about everything, and making everything as mobile as possible –- and as functional as possible. Telcos have to ride this trend, and the home gateway is going to be a key part of their strategy.
“I think that there has been a panic response in the last six months now that operators have rolled out voice, data, and video services in many territories. They are realizing that it is just competitive –- if that –- with many of the other offerings in their territory for TV service,” says 2Wire’s Fink. “They have to have a services platform where they can launch other stuff that the other guys are not doing. They have the high-speed data networks. So they are starting to focus on applications like managed homes and managed media within the home, and backup services for your music and photos.”
But it is early days yet for telcos to reach such a goal, and the home gateway is still on a development path, both in terms of technology issues and product enhancement and evolution.
One issue for fiber-network home gateways is whether the industry will eventually converge on a single product format –- either a one-box integrated ONT/gateway or a 2-box separate ONT and gateway. As already discussed, there are various pros and cons to these two formats, but the basic current driver is the telco’s fiber-technology and installation strategy, which reduces essentially to telco-specific costs. However, for mass-market products, economies of scale can be considerable over the long term, and there would be obvious advantages in maximizing rollout if one of the formats became highly dominant.
On a purely economic view, an integrated one-box design offers obvious manufacturing savings, but also additional costs for ruggedization if mounted externally or for additional fiber pulling if mounted internally. But a 2-box design allows the use of a multipurpose gateway that could be produced in very large quantities, which might offset the additional manufacturing costs of separate devices.
Gateway software provides a more technical issue. If telcos are going to exploit the gateway to offer new services and applications, they will need to open the gateway to third-party application developers and partner with them. Currently, this is difficult, because there is no open middleware or operating system that ASPs can use.
“There needs to be a well defined middleware for gateways –- a standards-based middleware similar to OCAP or MHP –- that the industry needs to develop. Once you have that open standards-based middleware, third-party ASPs can develop applications for this device, and they can partner with us to offer them,” says Verizon’s Saxena. “I think that is really going to be the path forward. Already set-top boxes are moving in that direction so that applications can reside on them.”
He is fairly confident, however, that this standards gap will be closed over the next two or three years.
Another area where further standards development is needed is in management. The universally used TR-069 is a highly functional protocol, but still lacks some features of practical importance in mass-market service rollout, such as flexible customer-type groups, helpdesk support, statistics, and CPE inventory. Currently, vendors offer their own approaches to these requirements.
IMS is potentially a key capability to integrate into a home gateway, and this is already happening. As (or if) IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) becomes more widespread in telco networks to support multimedia services and VOIP, the home gateway can host the necessary IMS client to the WAN side to act as a proxy for the non-IMS devices on the home network and the IPv4/MAC constraints of the home network (devices have MACs, not inherent IP addresses as they would in an IPv6 environment). And IMS is key to increasing the gateway’s functionality, such as through the use of SIM-card-like authentication mechanisms for services (currently a subject of much industry interest), and to enhance service convergence, availability, and innovation.
“New functionality is required within the home gateway when using IMS technology to provide new services able to coexist in a converged world between fixed and mobile networks,” says Tilgin’s Iacovoni. “The operators need to be able to wed the home with the greater IMS network. To make that happen, you have to deploy a lot of different functionality within the home gateway. It offers enormous potential and is something that operators are starting to act on.”
As use of IMS for service convergence is still at a very early stage, the widescale implementation of IMS capabilities into home gateways is likely to be at least five or more years away, according to Infonetics Research’s Heynen: “It’s just that the revenue-generating potential doesn’t justify the complexity of the IMS framework just yet."
A further issue is that IMS means migrating from H.323 to SIP, and VOIP-enabled home gateways (such as France Telecom’s LiveBox) tend to use H.323, which introduces complications for telcos with an existing subscriber base.
Turnkey product approaches may become more common as the home-gateway paradigm becomes widely established – an approach that 2Wire, for example, is following.
“We have really moved more towards converging our media, residential gateway, and server technologies inside the home into the single design architecture, because we definitely see a space where operators want one unified product and support environment,” says 2Wire’s Fink. “And that is starting to mean that we need a more open and adaptable set of technologies to be put in a variety of different platforms.”
Feature integration is also on the roadmap, as telcos are interested in a more overarching converged product suite that offers, for example, a big storage disk for backup capabilities, and potentially set-top box functionality as well. However, this is fairly expensive to do, as it turns the gateway into virtually a highly optimized PC –- and it naturally doesn’t have much support from set-top-box vendors, so it may never become a mainstream approach. If it does, it's still some years away.
But there are many other features and capabilities that are slated for integration into the home gateway, such as WiMax WAN interfaces, telemetry (security monitoring and utility monitoring, for example), and femtocells.
Finally, there will be increasing numbers of gizmos that telcos will be able to offer to their subscribers to hang off their home gateways and networks. One example of the possibilities is represented by devices like the Westell Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: WSTL) MediaTerminal AV. This is essentially a small wall-mounted touchscreen device and an associated DECT handset. The device acts as an Ethernet/WiFi client to a gateway, enabling the telco to offer voice and various, customized Internet-type services to people without a PC, or who don’t want to use one.
But an inevitable feature of the telco home-gateway market will be a strong element of mix and match according to different telco requirements. Standards will provide an array of options from which telcos can choose, but there will be no single reference design for a home gateway. And there will be lot of product aspects –- such as the plastics used in the casing –- that will be used as differentiators but will never be standardized. So an inevitable result will be product and market fragmentation, intensified by PC-like price-banding structures that telcos will adopt as they eventually move to providing ranges of gateways to target their consumer customers more closely.
“It’s becoming a lot more like the cellphone market,” says Fink. “You are starting to see each operator say, 'I want something different from the other guy, I would like to be able to have some differentiation to pull in customers and attract customers.' As a vendor, we will also have to be able to scale and support that kind of customization from a hardware and a software perspective.”
— Tim Hills is a freelance telecom writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.
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