Ericsson will release the Home IMS Gateway (HIGA) during first half of 2009 to provide remote access and multimedia communication services to home devices.
HIGA, which is being standardized in the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) and ETSI TISPAN, is the kernel in Ericsson’s Connected Home solution, providing telecom-grade, remote end-to-end access to home devices.
Behzad Farmand, portfolio marketing manager for Connected Home at Ericsson, says that consumers are facing increasing problems handling their personal content at home, storing and backing up media content, and gaining access to it remotely. “Imagine being able to access your home-entertainment devices and digital content wherever you are,” he says. “The Connected Home solution is a true merger of the telecom, entertainment and infotainment industries, enabling you to access all your home devices and associated services, anytime, anywhere and on any device. It bridges for the first time in history the gap between the telecom and consumer-electronics worlds.”
Connected Home will not only give us mobile access to our home devices, but also enable access from other homes, such as at friends and relatives. “For example, you will be able to view a video you have stored in your home on a TV set in your friend’s home,” Farmand says.
Along with HIGA, the Ericsson Connected Home solution builds on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standard, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standard, and other open standards. The IMS standard is, for instance, used for authentication, authorization and for routing of remote-access control messages. And the DLNA standard guarantees that one device can “talk” to another, regardless of brand. HIGA serves both as a termination point for IMS signaling from the operator backend and as a DLNA peer towards the home network.
HIGA is set for release in the first half of 2009 and will be demonstrated at the 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress.
Farmand sees huge potential in the Connected Home business. “There are already over 2200 DLNA-certified devices in the market,” he says. “And I expect this figure to grow a lot in the coming years. The DLNA capability of the home devices, together with remote accessibility, gives us possibilities that we’ve never had, possibilities we have just started exploring.”
In 2010, Ericsson will start releasing high-level application programming interfaces (APIs), making the IP-enabled digital home domain accessible for software designers, hiding the underlying complexity of the network and device configuration. This opens up several opportunities to the developer community, Farmand says, and makes service deployment both fast and simple. Besides traditional segments, such as gaming, music and content accessibility, these APIs will support the development of home-management services in a wide range of areas such as surveillance, utility control, and admittance control.
“Developers should already start getting familiar with IMS and Connected Home, and think about what related services they would like to develop,” Farmand says.
By Benny Ritzén
