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“There will be a mixture of cloudbased and gatewaybased media delivery for various services.” STEVE CHRISTIAN, VERIMATRIX
include several other personal devices such as tablets, mobile phones and connected consoles etc. The complexity of fragmented platforms across devices is compounded with inconsistent implementation of security features such as fingerprinting, watermarking and rights management across these
devices,” she advises. RESPONSIBILITY. Fawcett reiterates his earlier observations. “Service operators have the responsibility to assure premium content security, and provide the quality of user experience that mitigates against the need to misuse.” Marcolini reveals that preventing bandwidth misuse is something that his company has focused on for the past few years through the introduction of is StreamBoost technology. “Our solution ensures that network based services only consume the amount of bandwidth that they need, leaving room for other applications to coexist. StreamBoost is a valuable asset for expanding the number of carrier class services that can be delivered to the home,” he claims. According to Christian, security is very important, but becomes even more so as the gateway becomes a common point where content is concentrated. “It becomes a type of Fort Knox that hackers are desperate to break into. Although legacy vendors make a big deal of the supposed differences between CA and DRM technologies, from our point of view the business challenge is simply one of providing uniform rights management for all possible modes of consumer consumption and associated device types. Furthermore, although different devices often use different native CA or DRM systems, the challenge for the operator is to bridge the differences between these technical formats. It’s clear that making the gateway device responsible for conversions and bridges can be difficult and costly, especially in a period of rapid technical evolution.” STANDARDS. With standards such as TR069 emerging to facilitate a multi-vendor environment, will this trend continue or will proprietary solutions emerge to disrupt such dynamics? Bristow says that ADB is convinced that TR-069 and its related standards for managing different network devices are a key
part making the messy complexity of home networks work for all the services and applications subscribers want to use. “On the other hand, there are many devices that do not (yet) support TR-069, so there is plenty of scope for proprietary extensions, bridging these non –controlled devices into the TR-069 world,” he advises. Agami suggests that TR-069 is “catching up” as a remote management standard in multiple in-home devices, including Home gateways, STBs and more. “Interoperability and standards will continue to be important as service providers' usage of remote management systems (ACS – Automatic Configuration Systems) to manage and support the home CPEs increases.” Glasspool can see “no reason” for proprietary standards to interfere with the progress of TR-069 and predicts it will be adopted more widely. “The more important question is what happens to the data once you have collected it,” he suggests. According to Bees, the home network will continue to need standardised device management, device interconnection, service semantics, device abstraction, interconnection between home and cloud located service logic, software installation and content protection. “Nevertheless there may still be a place for some innovative non-standard approaches. The BSPs and application service providers evaluate the role of standard and non-standard solutions and make business decisions, taking into account time to market, service differentiation, and the availability of a standards-based ecosystem.” CONSISTENCY. Egan says G.hn is fully TR069-compliant and has several extensions to TR-069 to ensure maximum flexibility of control and management is available to a G.hn network. “We are fully supportive of the TR069 model and will foster further developments for G.hn that help extend TR-069 applications to every corner and need in the home,” he confirms. Zijlstra describes TR-069 and the related protocol group as “a step in the right direction...The goal here is to have a well-defined way to manage the different devices. It is highly unlikely that a proprietary solution will emerge that changes this development, because at the moment no vendor exists that can impose such a solution in the market place. For this reason it is to be expected that the standardisation around the TR-069 protocol family will continue.” Black predicts that TR-069 will continue as the mechanism to transmit and receive baseline, standards-based data between the home and the Service Provider’s network. “Proprietary solutions could complement this with extensions to TR-069 or direct connections to external cloud services,” he adds.
Oggel says that standards are “crucial” for an ecosystem such as this to develop functionality quickly, which is beneficial to the end consumer. Iyer suggests that the emergence of the TR069 standard and its extension across multiple device types and paradigms has been a great aid in ensuring consistency and interoperability for monitoring and configuration of embedded devices in managed networks. “The DTV industry is placing an increasing emphasis on quantitative data gathering across an integrated user viewing experience, which TR069 covers in part, but does not address fully in its current form. Recent efforts by the Broadband Forum to incorporate DTV experience extenders such as applications on unmanaged devices are interesting, but as of yet no standard solution sufficiently covers the full content viewing ecosystem, and so proprietary solutions are emerging in this area. We expect these trends to continue,” she says. FAMILY. Fawcett notes that TR-069 is part of a family of technical standards that enable management and monitoring of devices, and that in addition, SNMP and XMPP have proven to be suitable standard protocols for many deployed services. “As the service operators extend their reach into the home with the increasing need to support and manage more Consumer Electronic devices, open standard mechanisms are required,” he adds. For Marcolini, standardisation is the foundation for the enablement of multi-sourcing. “For many service providers around the world, this is an absolute requirement as it helps create competition between vendors, but more importantly helps de-risk the supply of their mission critical equipment.” Christian advises that TR-069 tries to create a multi-vendor environment for service operators so that they can manage the gateway device that reside in their customer’s premises from an external system. “A standard like this becomes important when it can enable multivendor participation. In certain kinds of systems, standards are only necessary to be able to share the content, they are not necessary to manage the device itself. That device, therefore, can be a completely proprietary system and wholly owned and subsidised by the network or system operator and probably produced exclusively for that network operator, just like traditional set-top boxes have been. IP-based standards in networks allow operators an opportunity to cost-effectively deploy a security system and business rules that can satisfy all the demands of content owners while creating the transparent usage model that consumers demand. We believe that IP and the sophisticated protocols built on IP are the common building blocks to make digital convergence happen inside the home.”
22 EUROMEDIA