The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) today announced the creation of the ATIS Home Networking (HNET) Forum, which it says gives it “the single, centralized body responsible for comprehensively addressing home networking standards.”
ATIS claims the HNET Forum is unique in that it’s the only body to assess the wide variety of ongoing home networking standards development work. It says the forum provides a pragmatic solution to the often confusing and decentralized home networking standards development arena.
The Home Networking Forum’s creation resulted from ATIS’ Home Networking Assessment & Work Plan. Commissioned by the ATIS Board of Directors, the Focus Group assessed issues impacting the development of a cohesive home networking infrastructure to support VoIP, IPTV and other IP-based services.
This forum will place an emphasis on North American and ATIS member company needs in coordination with other regional and international standards development organizations.
Released today and available to the public, this document is the result of more than a year’s work by ATIS’ Home Networking Focus Group (FG). The Focus Group included representatives from: Cisco, Verizon, AT&T, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Qwest, Sony, Hitachi, ADC, Corning, Haywire, Intrado, Conexant Systems and Widevine.
The effort is part of ATIS’ ongoing work to address the needs of operators and their suppliers as it applies to home networking. The group claims the document identifies dozens of gaps in home network standards as well as more than 30 groups that are at work on home networking specifications.
ATIS’ IPTV Interoperability Forum, (IIF) has already been hard at work on specifications as they apply to IP video services. ATIS works with a series of regional and global groups to forward product standardization and interoperability.
ATIS says the Assessment & Work Plan includes:
- A home networking technological assessment from both logical and functional perspectives. This includes a high-level framework and the identification of IP home networking essential “building blocks.”
- An in-depth industry analysis to better understand the current status of home networking standards’ development; the study revealed 34 different groups with study programs related to the home network.
- A standards gap analysis in technical areas, such as: management, QoS, security, connection and discovery, remote access, and energy consumption. The HNET-FG study revealed 33 technical standards gaps, each requiring action.
“The Home Networking Assessment & Work Plan’s completion is a landmark achievement,” said Susan Miller, ATIS president and CEO, in prepared comments. “It establishes the framework, and identifies the objectives of our ambitious and newly created Home Networking Forum. With the home networking ecosystem’s premier companies’ participation, this Forum will be a leader in the truly interoperable home network’s realization.”
The Forum has scheduled its initial meeting for Feb. 3, 2009 and will include a review of the Home Networking Assessment & Work Plan, and begin addressing identified issues.
The first meeting, ATIS added, will be open to all interested participants from the information, entertainment and communications industry, including: carriers, service providers, consumer electronics companies, content suppliers, equipment manufacturers and others interested in home networking’s technical standardization.
Future meetings, however, will be limited to Forum member companies.
