By Paul Pishal, Philips Broadband Networks
The Cable TV industry is undertaking one of the most aggressive initiatives in its 51-year history. The digitization of the cable TV network infrastructure is proliferating on a massive scale with equipment deployment, compliance testing, and specification setting all taking place simultaneously. At the same time the consumer electronics industry also has a major digitization initiative occurring. The next generation of home devices will not only be digital, they will also feature "inhome" networking capability. Though monumental, both of these initiatives are occurring somewhat independently. Without a common roadmap of features, functions, and specifications, these two industries will remain out of step in delivering new and innovative services and applications to the digital home.
This paper focuses on the digital network initiatives both the Cable industry and the Consumer Electronics industry are pursuing. Investigating the strategies of these initiatives will demonstrate that without a closer partnership between these two industries, the full capabilities of new digital technologies will not be realized by the end-user. Finally, this paper will address the need for the development of a residential gateway architecture to provide a solution as these two networks continue to evolve.