2Wire, Inc., was (between 1998 and 2010) a home networking Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) manufacturer that provided telecommunications companies with hardware, software, service platforms, and remote CPE management systems. The company was headquartered in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

, in the

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...

. The company had employed approximately 1,600 employees globally, including 550 in R&D, sales and administration, 450 in customer care and 600 agency employees in five U.S. offices and an additional nine offices around the world by July 2010. The 2Wire HomePortal residential gateways were distributed by broadband service providers such as

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

Embarq Embarq Corporation (stylized as EMBARQ) was the largest independent local exchange carrier in the United States (below the Baby Bells), serving customers in 18 states and providing local, long-distance, high-speed data and wireless services to ...

windstream Windstream Holdings, Inc., also doing business as Windstream Communications or Windstream, is a provider of voice and data network communications (broadband, VoIP, MPLS), and managed services ( virtual servers, managed firewall, data storage, clo ...

and

Qwest Qwest Communications International, Inc. was a United States telecommunications carrier. Qwest provided local service in 14 western and midwestern U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dako ...

in the United States,

Bell A bell is a directly struck idiophone percussion instrument. Most bells have the shape of a hollow cup that when struck vibrates in a single strong strike tone, with its sides forming an efficient resonator. The strike may be made by an inte ...

in Canada,

Telmex Telmex is a Mexican telecommunications company headquartered in Mexico City that provides telecommunications products and services in Mexico. Telmex is still the dominant fixed-line phone carrier in Mexico. In addition to traditional fixed-line ...

in Mexico,

BT Group BT Group plc ( trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, bro ...

in the United Kingdom,

Telstra Telstra Group Limited is an Australian telecommunications company that builds and operates telecommunications networks and markets voice, mobile, internet access, pay television and other products and services. It is a member of the S&P/ASX 20 ...

in Australia and SingTel in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

. In July 2010,

Pace plc Pace plc was a British company who developed set-top boxes (STBs), advanced residential gateways, software and services for the pay-TV and broadband services industry. Pace's customers included cable, telco, satellite and IPTV operators. Th ...

of the United Kingdom agreed to buy 2Wire for $475m (£307m).

History

2Wire was founded in 1998 by Brian Hinman (who also founded PictureTel and Polycom), Pasquale Romano, Brad Kayton, Timothy Peers, and Tom Spalding. In January 2000, 2Wire delivered its first product, the HomePortal

residential gateway A residential gateway is a small consumer-grade gateway which bridges network access between connected local area network (LAN) hosts to a wide area network (WAN) (such as the Internet) via a modem, or directly connects to a WAN (as in EttH), wh ...

, at that year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). This broadband modem/router combination enabled

DSL Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric dig ...

connectivity with home networking, firewall protection, and remote management capabilities. The following year, in January 2001, 2Wire delivered a wireless residential gateway. In 2002, the company created a remote customer premises management platform called CMS. Later that year, 2Wire published the Open Gateway Management Protocol (OGMP). The OGMP formed the basis for the

TR-069 Technical Report 069 (TR-069) is a technical specification of the Broadband Forum that defines an application layer protocol for remote management and provisioning of customer-premises equipment (CPE) connected to an Internet Protocol (IP) networ ...

WAN management protocol subsequently ratified by the DSL Forum in 2004. In early 2003, 2Wire delivered a wireless gateway with a complete

system-on-a-chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

architecture. Also in 2003, the company acquired Sugar Media, a digital media provider. The following year, in the spring of 2004, 2Wire launched MediaPortal, a multi-service media platform that integrates DSL and

satellite A satellite or artificial satellite is an object intentionally placed into orbit in outer space. Except for passive satellites, most satellites have an electricity generation system for equipment on board, such as solar panels or radioi ...

services. The MediaPortal-powered

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

, combining

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

, digital video recorder, video, music, photo viewings, and messaging capabilities, was deployed by AT&T in 2006 as part of its Homezone service. In January 2006, 2Wire introduced the HomePortal intelligent Network Interface Device (iNID), an outdoor broadband residential gateway that supports VDSL2 and

fiber to the premises Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

(FTTP) connections. 2Wire acquired Kenati Technologies, an

embedded device An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' as ...

software company, in October 2007. , 2Wire had shipped more than 20 million residential gateways to its telecommunications provider customers. In November 2008, 2Wire and

Blockbuster Inc. Blockbuster LLC, formerly known as Blockbuster Video, was an American-based provider of home video and video game rental services. Services were offered primarily at video rental shops, but later alternatives included DVD-by-mail, streaming med ...

developed and released MediaPoint Digital Media Player, a set-top box that plays video content from a home computer network.

Products

2Wire produces a series of residential gateways under the HomePortal name that enable home networking with interfaces that range from ADSL 2+ to fiber to the node (

FTTN Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

) (VDSL 1 and 2), as well as

FTTP Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

. The gateways are based on integrated

architectures, and have native

support, as well as support for

HomePNA The HomePNA Alliance is an incorporated non-profit industry association of companies that develops and standardizes technology for home networking over the existing coaxial cables and telephone wiring within homes, so new wires do not need to be ...

, MoCA,

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer com ...

b/g/n wireless standards, and Web-based remote access. The company also produces MediaPortal (not to be confused with the unrelated open-source software

MediaPortal MediaPortal is an open-source media player and digital video recorder software project, often considered an alternative to Windows Media Center. It provides a 10-foot user interface for performing typical PVR/TiVo functionality, including playi ...

), a multi-service media platform that combines high-definition (HD) and

standard-definition Standard-definition television (SDTV, SD, often shortened to standard definition) is a television system which uses a resolution that is not considered to be either high or enhanced definition. "Standard" refers to it being the prevailing sp ...

(SD) broadcast satellite or off-air TV programming with broadband services, DVR capabilities, music and photo storage and sharing, and home networking. One of their gateways, the 2701, had issues with the power supply, prompting Bell Canada to proactively swap the power supplies to their customers in 2008. Some laptops with two types of Intel wireless adaptors exhibited wireless issues, which were fixed by an updated Intel device driver.Internet Bell
/ref> The Pace 5012NV-002 Gateways were only available in Singapore for SingTel exStream Fiber Service and 2wire 2701 Series. In the rest of the world the brand is 2wire.

Affiliations

Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) is a standards organization that develops technical and operational standards and solutions for the ICT industry, headquartered in Washington, D.C. The organization is accredited by the ...

Broadband Forum The Broadband Forum is a non-profit industry consortium dedicated to developing broadband network specifications. Members include telecommunications networking and service provider companies, broadband device and equipment vendors, consultants an ...

(formerly DSL Forum) * Digital Living Network Alliance * Femto Forum *

(formerly Home Phoneline Networking Association) *

Home Gateway Initiative The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) was a nonprofit trade organization to discuss the key specifications and standards of residential gateways, also known as home gateways. It was founded by telephone companies (Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Franc ...

Multimedia over Coax Alliance The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) is an international standards consortium that publishes specifications for networking over coaxial cable. The technology was originally developed to distribute IP television in homes using existing cabl ...

(MoCA) *

UPnP Forum Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the ...

(Universal Plug and Play Forum) *

Wi-Fi Alliance The Wi-Fi Alliance is a non-profit organization that owns the Wi-Fi trademark. Manufacturers may use the trademark to brand products certified for Wi-Fi interoperability. History Early 802.11 products suffered from interoperability problems be ...

Partnerships

Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel–Lucent S.A. () was a French–American global telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent, the latter being a s ...

* ATand T * Bell Canada * BT Openworld *

CenturyLink Lumen Technologies, Inc. (formerly CenturyLink) is an American telecommunications company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, that offers communications, network services, security, cloud solutions, voice, and managed services. The company is ...

Juno Juno commonly refers to: *Juno (mythology), the Roman goddess of marriage and queen of the gods *Juno (film), ''Juno'' (film), 2007 Juno may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Fictional characters *Juno, in the film ''Jenny, Juno'' *Ju ...

MTS Allstream Bell MTS Inc. (formerly Manitoba Telecom Services) is a subsidiary of BCE Inc. that operates telecommunications services in Manitoba. Originally established as Manitoba Government Telephones after the Government of Manitoba purchased the Manito ...

NetZero NetZero is an Internet service provider based in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California. It is a subsidiary of United Online, which in turn is a subsidiary of investment bank B. Riley Financial. United Online is also the parent of Juno Online ...

SaskTel Saskatchewan Telecommunications Holding Corporation, operating as SaskTel, is a Canadian crown-owned telecommunications firm based in the province of Saskatchewan. Owned by the provincial government, it provides wireline and wireless communicat ...

* SingTel *

Telecom New Zealand Spark New Zealand Limited is a New Zealand telecommunications company providing fixed-line telephone services, a mobile phone network, internet access services, and (through its Spark Digital division) ICT services to businesses. It was know ...

* Telenor *

TELMEX Telmex is a Mexican telecommunications company headquartered in Mexico City that provides telecommunications products and services in Mexico. Telmex is still the dominant fixed-line phone carrier in Mexico. In addition to traditional fixed-line ...

TELUS Telus Communications Inc. (TCI) is the wholly owned principal subsidiary of Telus Corporation, a Telecommunications in Canada, Canadian national telecommunications company that provides a wide range of telecommunications products and services ...

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas ...

Windstream Windstream Holdings, Inc., also doing business as Windstream Communications or Windstream, is a provider of voice and data network communications (broadband, VoIP, MPLS), and managed services ( virtual servers, managed firewall, data storage, clo ...

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official site
Companies based in San Jose, California Technology companies established in 1998 Defunct networking companies Networking companies of the United States 1998 establishments in California