The ITU facilities in Geneva, Switzerland will see the G.hn Interoperability Plugfest event taking place from the 23rd to 27th of May, 2011. The event will allow the manufacturers of chipsets the very first occasion to test their product interoperability with the latest G.hn home networking standard. Organized by the Broadband and the HomeGrid Forums, the event will be aided by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory or UNH-IOL (News - Alert)

In a release, CEO of the Broadband Forum (News - Alert),. Robin Mersh said that “As one of the world's leading organizations for broadband best practices and technology evolution, we are pleased to be able to co-host the first G.hn chipset open interoperability event. This is a very important step on the road to bringing G.hn products to the market and represents a significant milestone for service providers planning to deploy G.hn,"

The new G.hn technology is being facilitated by the Broadband and HomeGrid Forums and by the ITU in order to speed up the process and get the technology up and running to its customers. Moreover, being the first ever attempt and a unique venture, the event is a landmark in the interoperability technology industry. At the event, the members of both forums are expected to conduct interoperability testing, utilizing the Interoperability Test Plan, which itself helps in establishing a whole range of data-link and physical-link layers for the testing process.

The Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau from ITU, Malcolm Johnson said that “The ITU supports this event and we believe this represents a significant milestone in the world's service providers aligning around G.hn. A multi-vendor silicon interoperability event furthers the technology, and with the support of the Broadband Forum and HomeGrid Forum members, we are working with important players that will be deploying this technology in the near future."

Having developed its first ever global home networking standard in order to bridge home network devices and services, ITU’s G.hn is capable of building such bridges over wire, phone lines, power lines and coaxial cables. The goal of this initial release was to complete basic testing with chipset manufacturers, and validate the test processes and results. This is in turn supposed to prelude the launch of the formal compliance and interoperability program from HomeGrid.