Major standards organisations cooperate to drive the development of Home Environment Services

Identification of key areas to enable ubiquitous service access from mobile and fixed devices

BARCELONA, Spain, April 24, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Broadband Forum, DECT Forum, HGI, Open IPTV Forum, Open Mobile Alliance and the Small Cell Forum held a successful workshop to investigate shared issues and opportunities to enhance support of services in the home. Hosted by the Open Mobile Alliance, the Home Environment Services workshop convened immediately preceding the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and identified shared focus areas in the rapidly diversifying home environment-

• addressing the ever expanding range of computing and connected devices in the home environment
• ensuring devices in the home have quality of service regardless of the access method, i.e. 3G, UMTS, LTE, DSL, Fibre, Cable, WiFi… 
• offering users ubiquitous access to converging services across devices in the home as well as seamless handover from one device to another in terms of service continuity
• strengthening and standardising wired and wireless support of Device Management
• supporting Machine to Machine (M2M) devices which are playing an increasingly important role in the extended distribution of services, and need a common management platform
• empowering users of devices in the home environment to exploit other capabilities such as centralised address books and access to rich multimedia content repositories

Mark Cataldo, Chairman of the Board of the Open Mobile Alliance and Workshop Chairman, greeted the success of the Workshop saying "The Open Mobile Alliance is very pleased that our organisations have come together to address this key technology area.  By cooperating, our organisations, OMA's service enablers and APIs will enrich the support of multimedia services across the rapidly diversifying range of devices."  

Robin Mersh, Broadband Forum CEO adds "It is increasingly evident that in today's rapidly developing market, not only is the remote management of devices needed, but it's crucial for both fixed devices and mobile devices. Co-operation between the various SDO's and fora is both necessary and very welcome."

With the advancing introduction of M2M devices, they require remote management and their distinctive functionalities provide exciting opportunities to create new services. Andy Germano, the Small Cell Forum Vice Chairman stated "The availability of service applications and APIs in the handset and home access points is quickly enabling the introducing of exciting services which build on recognising the user's presence in the home."  Oliver Maiwald, DECT Forum Board member says "The home environment is becoming increasingly exciting, with support of smart metering, home control units and gateways facilitating an explosion in services."

Hans-Werner Bitzer, HGI Vice Chair stated "Together with our partners, HGI is making enabling steps towards convergence by providing a modular and manageable application platform and service APIs for home connected services."  Mohammed Dadas, representing the Open IPTV Forum continued "With device discovery, content distribution/transfer, and content protection, the home is creating a mass market for IPTV services of the future."

The fora are now investigating how to further cooperate around these shared interest areas, and look forward to continued development and promotion of emerging services in the home environment.

For media information, please contact Account Manager Dana Corson on +44 1636 812152, +44 7795 615466 or email [email protected]

About the Broadband Forum 
Broadband Forum, a non-profit industry organization, is focused on engineering smarter and faster broadband connections. Our work defines best practices for global networks, enables service and content delivery, establishes technology migration strategies, engineers critical device & service management tools, and is key to redefining broadband.  Our free technical reports and white papers can be found at www.broadband-forum.org.

About the DECT Forum 
The DECT Forum is the international association of the cordless home and enterprise communication industry. DECT, DECT 6.0 and CAT-iq are worldwide-adopted technologies with high relevance for wireless voice, broadband home and enterprise communication.

The DECT and CAT-iq installed base in the consumer environment of cordless telephony has now reached almost 500 million units worldwide with the enterprise installed base estimated at a further 8.5 million handsets. More than 820 million DECT and CAT-iq devices have now been sold worldwide, which continues to increase by over 100 million per annum (Source: MZA, 2012).

The DECT Forum is located in Berne, Switzerland. Full members of the DECT Forum are currently: Aastra, Ascom, Atlinks, AVM, Binatone, CCT, Cetecom, Deutsche Telekom, Dialog Semiconductor, DSP Group, Gigaset, GN Netcom, Lantiq, NEC, Nemko, Orange FT, Panasonic, Philips, Plantronics, Polycom, RTX, Sagem, Samsung, SGW, Snom, Swissvoice, Technicolor, Uniden, Vtech.

For more information please visit: www.dect.org

About the Home Gateway Initiative 
The HGI, founded in 2004 by nine telecom operators, is shaping the next generation of internet and voice services. Starting from use-cases and service needs, the HGI sets requirements for Home Gateways, infrastructure devices, and the home network. The HGI now has members from across the globe, representing the entire spectrum of players in the broadband home area. http://www.homegatewayinitiative.org/

About the Open IPTV Forum
The Open IPTV Forum enables and accelerates creation of a mass market for IPTV by defining and publishing free-of-charge standards-based specifications for end-end IPTV services of the future. Founding members Panasonic, Samsung, Ericsson, Sony Corporation, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Philips and Nokia Siemens Networks have since been joined by other leading industry stakeholders including:

Bouygues Telecom, BBC, BT, Deutsch Telekom, KDDI, PCCW, Rogers, SES-Astra, TeliaSonera, ANT Software, D-Link, Motorola, Sharp, Vestel, Zyxel, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Huawei, HwaCom, Intel, Technicolor, ZTE, BesTV, IRT, RAI, Dolby, DTS, Fraunhofer, Gemalto, Intertrust Technologies, Mstar Semiconductor, MediaTek Inc, Opera Software, Penki Kontinentai, Quative/Nagravision, Rovi, Sigma Designs, Smartlabs, TNO, Testronics, Toshiba, Verimatrix.

Members of the Open IPTV Forum are working together on the development of open specifications because they recognise that combining the expertise of all parties involved will help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies. Their aim is to make the next generation of IPTV a mass-market service and to maximise the benefits of IPTV and Connected TVs for consumers as well as the industry.

As a collaborative industry body the OIPF has incorporated existing standards wherever possible - OIPF standards are also being adopted by complementary groups including HbbTV. A forthcoming device certification and IOT program will see the OIPF logo appearing on numerous services and devices, aiding consumers, service providers and manufacturers as new technologies are delivered to retail, end user living rooms and across multiple mobile screens.

Potential new members are welcomed across the communications and entertainment industries, including network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and home and network infrastructure providers – email [email protected]

About the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) 
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network. To date, OMA has published more than 100 enabler releases with ongoing maintenance, revisions and new versions of its work. OMA's specifications support the billions of new and existing fixed and mobile terminals across a variety of mobile networks.  Driven by the global demand for mobile data services, the member companies of the Open Mobile Alliance support the adoption of new and enhanced information, communication and entertainment solutions.  The Open Mobile Alliance includes contributors from all key elements of the wireless value chain, and contributes to the timely and efficient introduction of services and applications to the market.

For more information see http://www.openmobilealliance.org/

About the Small Cell Forum 
The Small Cell Forum (www.smallcellforum.org), formerly known as the Femto Forum, supports the wide-scale adoption of small cells. Small cells are low-power wireless access points that operate in licensed spectrum, are operator-managed and feature edge-based intelligence. They provide improved cellular coverage, capacity and applications for homes and enterprises as well as metropolitan and rural public spaces. They include technologies variously described as femtocells, picocells, microcells and metrocells. The Forum has 137 members including 63 operators representing more than 1.71 billion mobile subscribers - 33% of the global total – as well as telecoms hardware and software vendors, content providers and innovative start-ups.

SOURCE The Broadband Forum