The quest for wireless open standards will advance to the home networking arena as 17 major companies, both wired and wireless, have formed an alliance to simplify sharing of digital content among cell phones, personal digital assistants, consumer electronics and other devices.
The group is known as the Digital Home Working Group, a nonprofit organization.
“The Digital Home Networking Group has proposed a sound and fair baseline of interoperability standards, which is an important milestone toward realizing this vision,” said Danielle Levitas, director of IDC’s consumer devices and services programs.
The members include Nokia, NEC, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Samsung Electronics, IBM, Panasonic, Sony, Gateway, Sharp, Philips, Kenwood, Lenovo, STMicroelectronics and Thomson.
The companies began working together one-on-one until the group idea emerged about eight weeks ago, said Heikki Heinaro, director of Nokia mobile software.
“Due in large part to an increase in broadband adoption and device sales, consumers today are acquiring, viewing, managing and sharing an increasing amount of digital media on devices in the CE, mobile and PC domains,” said the group.
The idea was conceived by Intel and Sony with a vision of a blue-chip working group collaborating and applying open standards.
The key to bringing the idea to fruition lies in bringing the PC to the digital home, according to Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Desktop Platforms Group, explaining that it allows consumers to “create, edit, store and stream music, videos and photos to anywhere in the home.”
“As such, consumers want to easily enjoy this content, regardless of the source, across different devices and locations in the home,” said the group.
The companies expect to roll out the first products by the second half of 2004. Because the group will work on a variety of technologies, it will have to handle the complex challenge of digital rights management, which has grown into one of the major content issues in the wireless industry. But this may not obstruct the timetable because many of the products affected do not have rigid DRM requirements.
The group will work together to create a baseline to ensure a common platform for all the conflicting technologies in the home networking space. Cellular and broadband standards, including Wi-Fi and Internet Protocol, will conform to the common platform, according to the group. The standards that will be accepted by the group must also be formally ratified by an internationally recognized standards organization.
“The DHWG’s focus on delivering technical design guidelines to enable cross-industry digital convergence complements the efforts of the Wi-Fi Alliance to enhance the user experience through Wi-Fi product interoperability,” said Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance. “We share the vision of a wireless interoperable network for easily accessing and sharing digital content.”
Heinaro explained that the concept is not to create a new technology, but to set guidelines and specifications for a variety of devices.
Eight companies belong to the board: Sony, Microsoft, Matsushita, Hewlett Packard, Nokia, Philips, Intel and Samsung.
Heinaro said there is a technical working group with special groups open to all members.
In another standards development, the Chinese home-grown technology, TD-SCDMA Forum, has joined the Third Generation Partnership Project as a market representation partner.
This will allow the forum to provide “a market dimension to the specification work of 3GPP,” said the group.
