In April of this year, CableLabs upped the ante on customer equipment with the release of the Cable Home 1.0 specification. Now Broadcom and Gatespace have responded by building a smarter DSL gateway.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [October 25, 2002]

You may not heard of Gatespace, whose global headquarters are in Göteborg, Sweden, but you've probably heard of its backers, who include Ericsson and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.

Gatespace is a supplier of service management solutions for network service providers within the broadband, telematics, and industrial markets.

Gatespace is working with Broadcom to deliver services for DSL providers in the United States. The Gatespace and Broadcom service set will enable DSL providers to rival cable modem services based on CableLabs' Cable Home 1.0 specification, released in April of this year. At the time, Mark Coblitz, Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning at Comcast Corporation, noted, "CableHome makes home networking easy and convenient for the customer by providing the framework for trained technicians to configure home networks."

DSL providers need similar features for DSL routers, modems and gateways. Broadcom and Gatespace combined will be providing these products to equipment manufacturers, and products should be available to service providers and end-users soon after that.

The Gatespace e-Services Platform is a comprehensive standards-based solution for deployment and management of broadband services. The technology was developed as part of the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi), whose members include a wide spectrum of broadband Internet providers such as NTT and Cablevision, as well as equipment manufacturers like Ericsson, Sony, and IBM.

With Gatespace and the OSGi combined, you get gateway software with all of the expected features like VPN access and stateful inspection, but built on an open, Java platform. The gateway's software is therefore accessible to queries, and it is also updateable and programmable.

One ambitious adaptation of Gatespace software has been deployed over Ericsson gateway hardware. The e2 home project is a block of 59 apartments built by Skanska in Stockholm. Apartment dwellers can monitor and adjust their heating, electricity, and water use. They can also reserve space in the community's shared sauna or book time in the laundry room, and the key card locks on those rooms will only let in those who have reserved time in those rooms. Food can be ordered and delivered to "smart delivery boxes" outside each apartment. The system also tracks burglar, water, and fire alarms. All of these services are monitored from a single screen in the kitchen, which can also be connected to e-mail and hooked up to intelligent appliances.

Of greater interest to broadband service providers is the Gatespace gateway and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application built into Gatespace's e-Services Platform. The software incorporates a hardware firewall and also enables parental control, port forwarding, and other common gateway features.

The platform also enables remote technical support, meaning that service providers can query the gateway to find information they need to know in order to help a customer. Greg Baltzer, Gatespace CEO, said that this is a handy feature, since "you cannot ask a home user if they're on DHCP or PPPoE. It's much easier to be able to access this information yourself."

Baltzer added that another important feature is that Gatespace's gateways are easier to self-administer.

"I saw an AT&T focus group study recently that said that 30 to 50 percent of users did not know what a firewall was (the number was different in various groups)," Baltzer explained. "They would not pay for a firewall. On the other hand, when asked whether they wanted 'security' most responded 'yes.' Our product allows service providers to sell 'security' to users who do not know the technical terms associated with Internet security."

Gatespace software will be available in the United States soon, thanks to an alliance with Broadcom. Broadcom licenses its broadband service products to brand name vendors (OEMs). For Broadcom, the Gatespace software sits on a Linux OS (and can sit on almost any other OS such as VxWorks) and this Broadcom/Gatespace product does not require the memory overhead that the Java-based product needs.

Mark Abrams, Broadcom product line manager for DSL Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), said the Gatespace software would be released on Broadcom's BCM6345 chip set. Abrams added that the help desk features that Gatespace will provide should add value to Broadcom's products.

"As CPE becomes more complex, customer service becomes more expensive to service providers. Any time a customer or the service provider needs to make a change, the service provider has an expensive problem," Abrams said. "Integrating the Gatespace network management agent into our BCM6345 chipset will provide problem solving. Most network management agents just provide reporting. The Gatespace agent goes a step farther."

—End