residential gateway
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.
Examples
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.
—David A. Harvey, “The Next Big Home Networking Thing,” Home Office Computing, March 01, 2000
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.
—Doug Bedell, “ Everything's under control,” The Dallas Morning News, October 12, 1999
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.
—Kevin Fogarty, “Sub-$ 500 'Net device prepped by upstart firm,” Network World, January 08, 1996