n. A home device that provides high-speed Internet access and is able to route incoming data to PCs and to devices such as television sets and stereos.
2000
One of the loudest buzzwords to come out of The Yankee Group's Networked Home Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif., last fall was "residential gateway." These hardware devices promise to deliver an integrated set of telephony, Internet connectivity, data storage, home networking, and entertainment features through one box that will be capable of connecting to virtually every device in your home — from your PC and PDA to your '70s-era stereo.
1999
Nonetheless, several companies are developing devices called residential gateways that can perform those tasks and more. They are basing their projects on studies from Forrester Research and other firms predicting that at least 20 million American homes will have the necessary high-speed, high-capacity Internet access in three years or less.
1996 (earliest)
The product line, code-named NOMADS (for Networked Object Multimedia Application Development System), includes a high-performance video server and a set of authoring tools. It also includes a new set-top box, called a residential gateway, that has ports for high-speed Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) modem connections as well as Ethernet, token-ring, T-1 or Asynchronous Transfer Mode links, Jones said.