Residential gateways are critical to ensuring the successful delivery of multiple broadband services (digital video, IPTV, VoIP, etc.) to subscribers' homes -- key to helping operators increase revenue-per-subscriber. This month, market research firm Infonetics Research conducted a survey of incumbent and competitive telecom operators in North America, EMEA, and CALA who use residential gateways and CPE to offer broadband and multi-play services. The resulting 23-page report, Residential Gateway Deployment Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey, captures service providers' strategies for deploying and pricing residential gateways, and their top picks for vendors, services, technologies, and features.

"There is consistency among our survey findings from last year and this year: Service providers want to deploy residential gateways that are powerful and flexible and have multiple options for advanced interfaces, both wired and wireless. Also, gateways need to support a growing list of features to ensure the quality and security of the content being delivered in the home. Features like remote access, IPv6, and IGMP figure prominently among our respondents -- all of which signal a desire to deliver multicast video in the home," advises Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband access at Infonetics Research.

RESIDENTIAL GATEWAYS SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Service providers increasingly rely 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 and greater security features
• IPTV is the fastest-growing service that respondent operators expect to offer over their residential gateways
• Comtrend and Cisco head the list of vendors service providers consider among the top three residential gateway vendors
• Operators are looking to entice new subscribers with low up-front costs as the competition for new broadband subscribers intensifies, leading many to bundle their residential gateways with multi-play services instead of leasing them