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In a bid that reflects the similar conflict between operator-driven and open models in the mobile market, Orange has taken a lead. In a joint venture with fellow French firms Thomson and Sagem, the operator is seeking to diminish the influence of Microsoft, and point the way for other service providers round the world to keep a firm hand on their triple play steering wheels.

The French venture - which will be owned 60% by the France Telecom unit and 20% each by its equipment partners - is called Soft At Home, and aims to create a standard for the wireless interconnection of home media equipment, allowing devices such as TVs, mobile and fixed phones, and PCs to share content and services, and all to be managed by a single remote control (possibly the handset). The software will be embedded in Orange decoders from later this year and will support some existing industry standards such as the Linux operating system, SIP protocol and H.323, as well as specifications from the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), UPnP (Universal Plug & Play) Forum, DSL Forum TR- 69, Open IPTV Forum, and Home Gateway Initiative. The wireless technology that takes the lead in the system therefore will largely depend on decisions made by these other bodies, in particular the DLNA. This Alliance has so far worked heavily with Wi-Fi for its wireless implementations, mandating Wi-Fi Alliance certification in its own compliance program from 2005, but it has also been experimenting with UWB, especially the Pulse~Link CWave platform, which is more optimized for high definition video than the most supported UWB flavor, WiMedia.

The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) is also a significant alliance, since it is working on systems for fixed/mobile convergence, particularly using the emerging femtocell mini-base station technology. These are issues close to Orange's and Sagem's heart, and the French firms are already in the forefront of femtocell development. The HGI is heavily European in focus, having been set up by nine operators in 2005, eight of them from the EU (Belgacom, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, TeliaSonera, Telefónica and Telecom Italia) plus Japan's NTT. HGI sees its main tasks as establishing technical and interoperability specifications and providing input to standards bodies and bases much of its own work on existing standards from the ITU, the DSL Forum, UpnP and those chosen by the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance). Paolo Pastorino, CTO at the HGI, says the French initiative is "definitely a good move. It's another recognition of the big problem -- trying to find a fully working ecosystem. Transferring applications between consumer electronics, IT, and telecom infrastructure is very difficult."

Orange is seeking to be the focal point uniting all these diverse efforts geared to digital home networks, so keeping its position as the primary controller and point of contact for the residential user account - which will increasingly also be integrated with multiple mobile accounts, as quad play bundles start to gain acceptance. In so doing, it is challenging various other would-be leaders of the home networking market, particularly Cisco and Microsoft. Microsoft's MediaRoom initiative will be directly challenged in France by Soft At Home, and operators elsewhere are sure to follow Orange's lead.

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