Operators rate Arris and Pace top residential gateway vendors, according to a recent survey from Infonetics Research.
Service providers are increasingly relying on residential gateways instead of basic modems to deliver voice, data, and video services because they can be remotely managed, have an open application layer to add on new features, and offer higher throughput, greater security features, and the ability to monitor revenue-generating traffic within the home network,” noted Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.
“Residential gateways have quickly become the new gatekeeper for high-margin traffic,” added Heynen about the 2014 Residential Gateway Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey.
Arris and Pace supplant Huawei and ZTE (from last year’s survey) as the perceived top residential gateway vendors among Infonetics’ operator respondents.
Multiscreen video is growing quickly: 6% of survey respondents offered the service last year, 55% are offering it today, and 80% plan to offer it next year.
802.11ac shows some of the strongest growth among wireless technologies, with just 5% of operators surveyed using it today, moving to 85% in 2015.
Optimism for G.hn as an in-home networking technology continues to intensify despite the lack of available products: Though no respondents currently use G.hn, 45% expect to next year.
Infonetics’ 2014 IP Set-Top Box Features and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey found that IPTV providers are planning significant uptake of set-top boxes with 802.11ac in 2015.
“For set-top box (STB) vendors, the challenge is finding the right balance between adding new technologies and features while reducing costs to meet service providers’ demands and remain competitive. To do so, vendors need to build standard solutions instead of custom ones for each service provider,” advises Jeff Heynen.
“Adapting IP STB offerings for targeted markets is another factor,” added Heynen. “In China and India, low-cost IP STBs with fewer features, lower functionality, and more localized content are enough to meet customers’ needs, but in North America and Western Europe, there’s a growing appetite for more advanced STBs, like video gateways, which require a higher bill-of-materials cost, and the addition of more advanced features.”
802.11n dual-mode and 2×2 MIMO are currently the most widely-used WiFi technologies on IP set-top boxes (STBs), though 802.11ac shows the biggest gains among survey participants, growing from 6% today to 67% next year.
Operator respondents rated TR-069 for remote device/service-level management and hard drive for integrated DVR support as the top IP STB features.
Remote programming via tablet or mobile device heads the list of IP STB applications, rated highly by 67% of respondents, up 6 percentage points from last year’s survey. The top three IP STB suppliers currently installed by respondents are Arris/Motorola, Cisco, and Amino.
