As telecom and utility companies grapple how to jointly develop smart energy services, the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) believes a critical part of that connection will be made at the home gateway inside a broadband consumer's home.
The role of the home gateway was one of many issues discussed at the recent Smart Energy Services Summit, which was Organized by the HGI and related standards organizations (Beywatch, the Broadband Forum, Energy@Home and ETSI) and various utilities and home networking vendors, summit participants discussed HGI's software architecture that will allow smart energy services to run and managed in the home gateway.
At the conclusion of the event, participants decided that the best course of action will be to consolidate their service and architecture assumptions within the framework of an HGI requirements documents, HGI-RWD017-R3: Requirements for Home Energy Management and Control Service. Members of Beywatch and Energy@Home working on behalf of Telefonica TID and Telecom Italia were nominated as co-editors of the requirement document.
"The participants at the Summit recognized that consumers want to have more complete access to energy use information and be able to better control in-home energy consumption," said Duncan Bees, HGI's CTO, adding that "many broadband service providers within HGI believe that the broadband Home Gateway will be the right platform to provide those services, in collaboration with the energy providers."
Although the telecom and utilities industries couldn't be any more different in terms of technology and business requirements, the idea of these two industries working with one another continues to gain momentum. Notable examples of this trend include Verizon's recent alliance with the Utilities Telecom Council and Qwest's ongoing smart energy trial with Xcel Energy.
For more:
- see the release here
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