The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) on Tuesday published an updated QoS specification that incorporates support for IPv6 on home gateway devices.
With the "Home Gateway QoS Module Requirements" (HGI _RD027-R3) specification, HGI said it is addressing the ongoing evolution that service providers will provide for their subscribers moving to an IPv6 environment. It will also identify the Home Gateway requirements that will be required to extend the HGI service-class oriented QoS approach to include IPv6 addressing.
Duncan Bees, chief technology officer for HGI, said "HGI has identified how service providers can classify data traffic passing through the home gateway and provide appropriate treatment to each service class."
HGI said that by using the home gateway, which is applicable to both IPv4 and IPv6 networks on both the WAN and LAN sides of the Home Gateway, as a key QoS enforcement point, service providers can "designate service classes and their treatment based on a rich set of classification criteria, including the IPv4 and IPv6 headers."
Having this specification in place will help both the home gateway vendor community and their service provider customers assign specific QoS parameters to not only traditional triple play services, but also to over the top (OTT) video and VoIP services
Looking forward, the QoS mechanism could also support the emergence of smart home applications including energy management, remote healthcare and security.
In the United States, smart home applications have become a growth target for providers such as AT&T (NYSE: T), which will launch its Digital Life home automation service in March. It's likely AT&T will want to use its growing wireline-based U-verse broadband subscriber base to deliver this service over the home gateways they have deployed at the subscriber premises.
For more:
- see the release
Editor's Corner: Watching the home automation opportunity in 2013
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