Television is moving to the Internet, and empowered consumers are now very particular about what they watch, apart from when and where they watch it, loading the home gateway with daunting tasks.

A recent report on broadband Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), from the research firm Infonetics (www.infonetics.com), re-affirmed that the market for home gateways was growing, and predicted this market segment would increase multifold in the next few years. Obviously, it is the continuous adoption of broadband in the small office-home office (SOHO) sector that is fuelling revenues. But did you ever wonder what is causing the mass move to high-speed broadband connections? You got it right - it's the Internet. The Internet has been the prime factor for making broadband so popular in the last mile. The Internet continues to drive the evolution of access technologies and business models, even more than a decade after it first exploded on the horizon. Network operators and service providers have made considerable investments and technology deployments in the past many years, to offer high-bandwidth access to homes.

The term 'gateway' originated in the telecommunications field, and made it to the world of packet communications. A gateway is a network point that acts as an entrance to another network. So, in principle, a home gateway connects broadband or WAN access technology to one or more home network (LAN) technologies. Technically, a gateway can be just a Layer 2 bridge, or a Layer 3 router.

The Internet meets the digital home

We are living in the era of information, communications and entertainment. Today, a home will have PC(s), screen phones and printers, to provide information on the external world. There will also be handheld computers, laptops, corded and cordless phones, and fax machines, dealing with information on how to reach people any time and anywhere. Many homes also sport set-top boxes, TVs, game consoles, and MP3 players, comprising rich multimedia content for the purposes of entertainment. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA, www.dlna.org), formed in 2003, defines a digital home as a network of consumer electronics, PCs and mobile devices that co-operate transparently, delivering simple, seamless interoperability.

For a digital home to be enabled for the 'flow' of (digital or packetised) content (data, voice and video) it has to be a 'connected home', connected to the Internet for external access, and connected within the home for the sharing of digital content. Talking about the connection to the Internet, business acumen and economics have driven the engineering of convergence, the bundling of data, voice and video into one pipe (also called 'triple play') running into the home. As of this writing, efforts are under way to evolve and support 'quad play' on the home gateways, which adds wireless technology (mobile/cellular, as the first step) to the mix. Refer to www.thefmca.org and www.fixedmobileconvergence.net for details on fixed mobile convergence.

Figure 1 presents an interesting set up in an emerging digital home. It offers an enumerated set of discrete components that can make up a home gateway. A closer look reveals that the home gateway is central to the idea of the connected home. The evolution of connected homes promises an altogether new digital lifestyle, enjoyment of integrated or individual services of data, voice and video from various parts of the home; the convenience of in-home movement for laptops, cordless phones and tablet computers; enriching capabilities of networked storage and back-ups, home control and surveillance, home intranet and personal Web pages to share with the world. Some of the topologies of digital homes can have multiple but discrete connections to the Internet; such an arrangement is called 'multi-homing', and has not been dwelt on in the current discussion. Another aspect that has not been highlighted is the capability of the 'appliances' on the LAN side to directly connect to each other, without requiring any support from the home gateway.