Home Networks Heating Up

Today, the HomePlug Alliance announced that a joint proposal from the Alliance and Panasonic is the sole MAC/PHY proposal remaining in the IEEE P1901 work group process for creating an international standard for in-home and access powerline communication technologies. This is significant, because Panasonic was pursuing its own proprietary powerline solution (HD-PLC) after its submission to HomePlug for the HomePlug AV specification was not selected. For awhile, we had three competing solutions - HomePlug, Panasonic, and the solutions from Spanish chip developer Design of Systems ofn Silicon S.A. (DS2).

Although DS2's underlying technology was not selected by the IEEE P1901 work group, the company isn't sitting still. It indicates that it will have a 400 Mbps solution out soon. And, DS2 has an impressive list of European service providers that it says are taking a look at its solution. Europe may be where this market is won or lost. Given the strong emphasis on solutions such as bridges for IPTV and multi-service residential gateways, Europe is likely to be the leading market for powerline solutions. We're waiting to see which service providers and CPE vendors are willing to go public with their support for either the HomePlug or the DS2 solution. One suspects that many are waiting for a standards resolution in the IEEE before making a public affirmation of either technology.

In the meantime, both Entropic/MoCA and CopperGate/HomePNA were quite visible at last week's TelcoTV conference. CopperGate announced that 2 million HomePNA 3.1 chipsets have shipped, and several Tier 1 telcos -TELUS (Canada), KDDI (Japan), and Sonaecom (Portugal) - have been announced as customers.

In the U.S., AT&T and Verizon have chosen different solutions - Verizon is using MoCA for its FiOS deployments, and AT&T is using HomePNA 3.1 for U-verse rollouts. Verizon uses MoCA for different applications, depending on what FiOS services are being used in the home. For broadband services, MoCA can be used to eliminate the Ethernet run between the ONT and the residential gateway. MoCA is also a key component of the Home Media DVR solution, where existing coax is used to enable the multi-room DVR functionality as well as the PC-to-set-top media streaming features.

AT&T is using one HomePNA chipset in each U-verse residential gateway and one in each U-verse set-top box and they use HomePNA 3 for the u-Verse home networking to transport the IPTV.