Livia Rosu, HomeGrid Forum Marketing Chair
Two weeks ago, HomeGrid Forum held a joint booth with GiGAWire Alliance at Broadband World Forum 2019 at the RAI in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where we announced that the two organizations are merging.
Following years of collaboration with plenty of synergies between the HomeGrid Forum and GiGAWire Alliance, we decided to join forces to provide the industry with an even stronger focus to enable smoother and faster deployments for service providers with advanced solutions while ensuring a robust and versatile backbone, based on ITU-T G.hn technology.
G.hn is the core of systems for in-home and broadband access deployment and the new organization automatically ensures end-to-end coexistence and interoperability at all levels.
Looking ahead, the new organization will be structured to provide marketing and technical support for a range of key industry topics including Home Networking, Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Cars, Smart Grids, Light Communications (Li-Fi) and GiGAWire MDU.
Alongside the announcement of the merger, I was also speaking at Broadband World Forum on the topic of Light communications for Smart Cities. During the presentation I discussed the benefits ofLight Communications (LC) which is also referred to as ‘Li-Fi’ and set to be the next major innovation in realizing the full potential of Smart Cities. Providing low latency through the light spectrum and avoiding the disruption that is often experienced with radio frequency spectrum during congested periods, Li-Fi is nicely complementing the wireless technologies as it ramps up for specific use cases and unprecedented growth in the future. With the capability to support larger bandwidths and offer enhanced security while acting as both a source and receiver with low power consumption and easy installation, we can expect to see the Li-Fi market mature rapidly in the coming years.
I also had the honor of being asked to moderate the Pure, mixed or hybrid? | To complete or complement panel discussion where we looked at the success stories and pain points of convergence strategies to upgrade legacy networks and drive cost efficiency. Alongside a panel of distinguished speakers representing operators, I explored the challenges faced by cable operators when integrating a fiber-copper network and the considerations that they must take into account in order to remain competitive.
I was also invited to participate in the Women in comms lunch panel: Encouraging, engaging and empowering women in telco where we expressed the importance of keeping women at the forefront of a historically male driven industry. We discussed ways to engage young women around the opportunities in telco and how encouraging them to engage themselves in STEM studies from early age, starting already from school and university degree levels, is paramount to helping them gradually build the strong engineering knowledge needed for their active participation in shaping the telecommunications industry later on.
Broadband World Forum 2019 marked a new era for the HomeGrid Forum, and I am looking forward to seeing all that we can achieve in the future. With a more focused approach and some exciting new markets, we can address the challenges faced by the industry and offer advanced solutions to ensure that the requirements raised by the industry can be met. It is important to constantly re-examine everything in this ever-growing industry and as we move towards the next era, we will continue to develop solutions for a whole host of technologies and new emerging markets.