Residential Gateways - connecting your home to the web

By: Michael Crotty

Picture this: It's a dark and miserable winters night, you just spent the day hard at work, and you can't wait to sit down and unwind. You park the car, climb out and walk up the driveway, put you hand in your pocket, and guess what no keys! What do you do?

In future, you may have more choices then you think. Imagine being able to take out your mobile phone, (Internet enabled of course!), surf to a page, enter your pin number, and have that lock opened for you. Still not convinced? Perhaps another scenario might help. Imagine you are working later than you expected and by the time you get home you have missed your favorite program on television. How useful would it be to go to a secure web page, and set your video recorder to record this program?

Well, this is the dream of many companies, who, in addition to supplying you with a single box which provides high-speed Internet access, telephone service, email, and interactive television, also acts as a gateway to the myriad of other devices in your home.

Ericsson have released a product called the eBox, which provides many of these features, including Internet access, and the ability to download and electronically pay for music tracks. Motorola's set top box offers a cable modem, high definition TV decoding as well as providing a platform for future services. Planned services will extend to Internet connectivity, and a personal video recorder capable of recording 30 hours of programs.

Other vendors are lining up with similar Internet offerings: Nokia's Media Terminal adds a broad range of Internet-based services to a normal TV set, Indrema's Entertainment System is a set-top device that converts a TV into a high-end gaming system, and TiVO's "personal video recorder" has a large capacity hard disk for up to 30 hours of TV program storage.

The key constraint on the popularity of these devices will be cost. Currently these devices cost the same as a new wide screen television. However, not all of this cost need be passed to the consumer, the cost of mobile phone handsets for instance are heavily subsidised by the mobile phone operators themselves. Could not a similar arrangement be made with cable television providers (NTL), phone operators (Eircom, ESAT etc.), or even electricity providers? Only time will tell.

Further information:
Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi)
Ericsson's eBox
Motorola DCT5000