Horizon Gateway for home offices

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM: U4EA Technologies, a leading provider of integrated access technology for converged communications, today announced the Horizon HG1100 Home Office Gateway, a TR-069-enabled gateway that enables operators to deliver new services and offer a better Quality of Experience for their residential customers.

The Horizon gateway will be on display in booth # 118 at the Broadband World Forum in Brussels, Belgium, September 30-October 1, 2008.

The Horizon Home Office Gateway is a single device that enables service providers to drive new revenues by delivering a range of combined IP telephony and data services to home office users, while reducing support and service activation costs through remote management. The product is plug-and-play, delivering an extremely easy-to-use service to the user and minimizing installation costs for the service provider. Further, the gateways contain U4EA’s industry leading QoS, GoS, which enables service providers to guarantee reliable service when delivering multiple real-time services with different quality requirements.

“The Horizon home gateway is the ideal device to help carriers deliver a tailored and highly competitive TR-069-based offering,” said Ray Selli, U4EA’s vice president of Soho products. “The products are fully customizable, enabling service providers to remotely present their own logos, look-and-feel and customer messages. In addition, flexible feature activation enables easy and cost-effective delivery of profitable new services to existing customers and to attract new business.” TR-069 is the CPE WAN Management Protocol that has become a worldwide standard for cost-effective management of customer premises equipment (CPE).

The Horizon Home Office Gateway contains a comprehensive set of advanced home networking features for reliable VoIP and broadband. Emphasizing ease of use, Quality of Service and security, features include Wi-Fi (secured by default), automatic QoS, voice call conferencing, USB device support and emergency call prioritization. The product is available with either Ethernet or ADSL2/2+ WAN options, a 4-port Ethernet switch, firewall and telephony ports for use of analog phones and a back-up lifeline to the PSTN. Horizon’s TR-069 client conforms to TR-069 and TR-104 Broadband Forum specifications. The Horizon’s choice of ADSL2/2+ chip-sets assures compatibility with leading DSLAM vendors.

Experience

Users are increasingly accessing business applications from home, where they must share broadband capacity with other home users and broadband entertainment services. The Horizon series is designed to meet this demand by effectively managing the increasingly diverse traffic now loading the home network.

With U4EA’s HG1100, home-office customers are assured priority access to the home broadband network, while sharing the link other home users. U4EA’s advanced patent-protected QoS mechanism, GoS, uniquely delivers the most efficient use of the broadband connection -- simultaneously guaranteeing reliable services while optimizing the bandwidth utilization. In addition, the HG1100 contains U4EA’s automatic VoiceQoS technology which dynamically prioritizes the voice traffic and intelligently allocates the required bandwidth for the duration of that call.

Driving Revenues & Reducing Costs

The Horizon gateway has been designed with ease of use as a key priority for mass-market users. When the user connects a standard analog phone or fax machine to the gateway, VoIP can be automatically configured and locked to the service provider’s telephony service. The intuitive UI encourages customers to leverage their broadband connection for more services and to self-provision when they do.

In addition to self-provisioning, the Horizon Gateway minimizes customer support costs by providing users with a simple diagnostics page which automatically detects and reports on common errors, and troubleshoots problems. The user is shown graphics-based solutions for cabling or connectivity problems, reducing the need for support desk calls. For service providers, advanced diagnostic data and real-time voice quality monitoring allows configuration of alarm thresholds to ensure early identification of trends and changes to network usage, before quality issues are experienced by customers.

The Horizon Home Office Gateway complements and extends U4EA’s existing product line, the Fusion Series of Multi-service Business Gateways, which serve the small-to-medium business segment. With the addition of the Horizon gateway, U4EA now enables service providers to deliver secure, reliable converged VoIP, data and video services to the smallest home office, as well.