The present invention utilizes a gateway providing an open software interface to control in-home communications and to enable in-home devices of various divergent technologies to selectively access external communication features. An in-home communication network utilizes any one or more of several available in-home digital networking media to connect the gateway to device interfaces. The gateway comprises interfaces to a plurality of external communication networks, and one or more in-home communication media, a router coupled to the various interfaces and a controller. Each device specific accessing the in-home network connects to media through a device interface. There will be different interfaces for enabling access by different types of customer premises devices. Each device interface provides physical access to the media as well as functional interfacing, to enable operation with the particular type of customer premises device. All of the device specific interfaces implement a standard software referred to as a common application program interface (API) interface, to enable communication over the media and accessing of in-home and/or external communication services through the gateway.