The exponential growth rate of Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) subscribers worldwide, increasing deployment of broadband Internet access to the home, and the steady increase in the number of installed home networks has created an opportunity to support new communication experiences in the digital home. The end result for users will be new IP-based devices, services, and capabilities that go far beyond what today's communication technologies can deliver. Enabling these new communication experiences will require a digital home communication architecture consisting of new standards and classes of communication devices.

In this paper, we summarize the results of a recent Intel Corporate Market Research (CMR) study on unmet consumer communication needs and highlight how the collected data suggests the need to develop a general, standards-based framework for digital home communications and the development of two specific new device classes. The two device classes and their uses are presented in detail. The requirements for the proposed digital communications framework are compared with the existing Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) framework for digital home entertainment [1]. We conclude with an overview of similar architectural components that will be needed to establish the digital home communications framework.