New research from Premonvision provides insights to the Asia Pacific home gateway market up to 2012
LONDON, United Kingdom, -3 December, 2009 - The development of the residential gateway market in Asia Pacific 2009-2012 is discussed in an advisory client report from advisory and consulting firm Premonvision. The report is based on confidential and anonymous interviews with operators from the region.
The region is highly diverse with a wide spread in the technology and service spectrum. “The development of the home gateway market can be broken down into three steps: the first step for operators is to develop home gateways that reduce customer support costs, such as truck rolls. The second home gateway evolvement is to ensure end to end quality of service. The third step is to improve device, service and content interoperability on the home network”, says Carl Gressum, Principal Advisor and responsible for the research.
The first and second steps are typically accomplished by using TR-69 and applications that can feed information streams from the home network back to the operator. The goal is to reduce the number of truck rolls, reduce the amount of customer support requests, shorten the length of support calls and improve the resolution rate and customer satisfaction. “Truck rolls drive significant costs for operators, where one operator in this research experiences up to 40% of all truck rolls are due to user errors and not because of faulty operator equipment. Therefore, even though the economic climate has put a damper on many projects, there is clearly a need for solutions that reduce operational costs, such as customer care”, adds Gressum.
The third step is where operators develop home gateways that include support for the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) guidelines or use the Open Services Gateway initiative Java framework for application development. For example, a majority of the operators in this research will deploy DLNA compliant home gateways by 2012. Both the DLNA and OSGi open potential revenue streams for operators, which some of the operators in this research intend to do. “We are concerned that operators in Asia Pacific view DLNA compliance as a chargeable service. By charging for DLNA compliance on the home gateway the operator will effectively become the owner of the DLNA network. Customers will seek support from the operator for any DLNA issues. This can become problematic given interoperability issues between DLNA products and that there are currently few ways to fully manage a DLNA network”, comments Gressum. “Operators are weak in consumer software and we are therefore concerned that charging for DLNA will drive customer support requests and customer churn”, says Gressum.
The in-home networking is dominated by Ethernet cabling and IEEE 802.11n (Wi-Fi), however, there are also some interest in coax-based Homepna solutions and home gateways with integrated power line communication (PLC) are gaining traction. Also, by 2012, one operator expects to launch a femtocell service. Outside of the domain of the residential market, there are mobile Wimax deployments in progress and also for UMA (unlicensed mobile access) services on a Wi-Fi hotspot basis.
“Although the region is overall pragmatic about how to develop telecoms services, the market is progressing in different directions and at different paces. This drives the need for custom solutions where suppliers need to carefully manage cost. The operators in Asia Pacific that participate in this research inform us that Western suppliers typically struggle to remain competitive with custom solutions”, concludes Gressum.
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Premonvision is an advisory and consulting firm in the Internet services and consumer electronics market. It provides in-depth research and consulting services on operator strategies for the residential market, and the impacts of consumer electronics and IT on the services market.
