The media richness of the services available to the end consumer has had a constant increase rate over the last century. This leads nowadays to the need of Ultra Broadband at home to handle future services such as 3D video that may reach the Gigabit per second. Moreover, beyond the bandwidth increase, the home network capabilities have to evolve in order to support new usages and to guarantee Quality of Service. This paper describes state of the art issues and typical requirements for the future home network and presents a solution fulfilling these requirements, based on an inter-MAC convergence layer. This solution is developed in the OMEGA FP7 project. It then provides initial results of a techno-economic analysis that studies the case of a hypothetical OMEGA Service Operator (OSO).

The steady growth of broadband penetration and the ongoing progress in networking technologies have increased the importance of home networks in the provision of high quality internet services. Market stakeholders have cooperated to evolve home networking towards an integrated, converged Gigabit technology, which will completely change the Home Area Networks (HANs) landscape and will enable a wave of possibilities. As Gigabit HAN technologies have just been launched in the market, there is a necessity of studying their future penetration. However, the lack of historical data on which such a forecast could be based presents a barrier that existing literature has not successfully addressed. The present paper attempts to analyze and forecast the diffusion of Gigabit HANs by suggesting a novel approach that overcomes the limitations of previous works. The proposed methodology is based on historical analogies and employs an objective and statistically reliable approach to investigate the degree of analogy and influence between services that drive the diffusion of broadband and home networking. The data used in this work were extracted from Eurostat's database and the final results, in terms of expected HAN penetration, are quite optimistic.