SoftAtHome Joins the Home Gateway Initiative
SoftAtHome Operating Platform meets the specifications and requirements of the Home Gateway Initiative.
PARIS, Monday, 29 September 2008 – SoftAtHome, a company created by Orange, Thomson and Sagem Communications to help service providers deliver convergent applications for the Digital Home, today announced that it has joined the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI), an industry body created to facilitate the delivery of home communication services to millions of broadband customers worldwide. It strengthens SoftAtHome’s commitment to industry standards initiatives, which are essential to the success of the Digital Home.
The goal of the HGI is to establish technical specifications that ensure the interoperability of residential gateways with multiple connected devices and the implementation of end-to-end services in the Digital Home. The HGI works closely alongside other industry such as the Broadband Forum, UPnP Forum and DLNA, and develops functional specifications around the home gateway for the delivery of multiple-play services to consumers.
The SoftAtHome Operating Platform enables service providers to deliver innovative and convergent applications for the Digital Home on different devices including Set Top Boxes and Home Gateways, and adheres to the specifications of the Home Gateway Initiative. In particular, it embraces important functionalities promoted by HGI such as remote management, quality of service, and use of the Gateway as the main entry point to the service provider’s network or access control to the home network.
This adds to the already existing support from SoftAtHome for the UPnP Forum, DLNA Forum, Broadband Forum and Wi-Fi Alliance.
‘The success of the Digital Home depends on the Service Providers’ capabilities to deliver new convergent services to their customers. The Home Gateway plays a central role for connecting the home to the network,” said Wojtek Makowski, Vice President of Technology at SoftAtHome. “By joining the HGI, we guarantee to Service Providers and Integrators a cost effective and fully interoperable solution that will enable them to deliver and monetize new services for the Digital Home.”
‘We are delighted with the addition of SoftAtHome to the HGI membership,’ said HGI Chief Technical Officer, Duncan Bees. ‘The excellent work that SoftAtHome are doing is in line with HGI specifications, and they have an innovative approach to developing technologies for the broadband home. ‘Their input in identifying carrier needs and the software and technology required to meet those needs complements the skill and knowledge sets of our existing sixty-plus members. HGI is continuing to extend the service-enabling capabilities of the Home Gateway, and we look forward to their active contribution in our continuing work in this dynamic, exciting space.’
About SoftAtHome SoftAtHome is a software company created by Orange, Thomson and Sagem Communications to deliver total convergence through an operating platform for the home digital environment. It fosters a new ecosystem made up of service providers, 3rd party application developers, integrators and hardware vendors to accelerate the advent of the Digital Home. The company is headquartered in France with development and sales teams in France and Belgium. For more information, visit us at www.softathome.com
About Home Gateway Initiative The HGI was founded and launched by nine telecom operators (Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, NTT, Telefonica and Telecom Italia) in December 2004, and now has members from five continents, representing the entire spectrum of actors in the broadband home arena. The main tasks of the HGI are to establish home gateway-related technical and interoperability specifications and provide input to standardisation bodies.
For further information, please contact:
Frederic Bonnard, VP Marketing SoftAtHome + 33 1 57 66 88 55 fredericbonnard@softathome.com
Shallu Behar-Sheehan, SoftAtHome media contact 5Raisins +44 (0) 7866 319 160 shallu@5raisins.com
Howard Jones, HGI media contact +44 (0) 7980 772 285 howard@bcspr.co.uk