What is Universal Plug and Play?

Universal Plug-and-Play is a networking architecture that provides compatibility among networking equipment, software and peripherals. UPnP^TM-enabled products can seamlessly connect and communicate with other Universal Plug-and-Play enabled devices, without the need for user configuration, centralized servers, or product-specific device drivers. This technology leverages existing standards and technologies, including TCP/IP, HTTP 1.1 and XML, facilitating the incorporation of Universal Plug-and-Play capabilities into a wide range of networked products for the home.

Universal Plug-and-Play technologies are rapidly adopted and integrated into widely-used consumer products such as Windows XP. Therefore it is critical that today's Residential Gateways be UPnP-compliant. Your gateway is at the forefront of this development, offering a complete software platform for UPnP devices. This means that any UPnP-enabled control point (client) can dynamically join the network, obtain an IP address and exchange information about its capabilities and those of other computers on the network. They can subsequently communicate with each other directly, thereby further enabling peer-to-peer networking. And this all happens automatically, providing a truly zero-configuration network.