How We See CE

Last week I wrote a story in a rather pessimistic tone about some recent developments in the home networking industry. Today, I'll try to provide a more optimistic view.

One of the reasons why the market for wired home networking products has not developed faster is the fragmentation of the industry. Today, consumers who want to create a wired network in their homes have to choose between five incompatible options; using coaxial cable (MoCA), using phone lines (HomePNA) or using power lines (with 3 non-interoperable options: UPA, HomePlug and HD-PLC). You can even combine then to create more incompatible options (using HomePNA technology or powerline technology over coaxial cable, for example, is also a popular option for some applications).

There is nothing wrong with those technologies, apart from their incompatibility. They satisfy today's market needs very well and all of them have healthy sales, in the millions of chips per year. And each technology has advantages and disadvantages, as this article describes very well:

[..] HPNA and MoCA [...] are clean-line technologies that work well over a limited number of connections available in the home. The average American home has roughly 43 AC outlets, compared to only a few telephone and cable jacks.

So "clean lines" (coaxial cable and phone lines) have the advantage of being, well...clean, but they have the disadvantage of not being widely available in the average American home, along with being almost non-existent in most parts of Europe and Asia. Power lines seem to be the only widely available solution in every room of every home of every country.

Does that mean that only power lines should be considered as a universal solution for wired home networking? Probably "yes" today, but maybe "no" in a couple of years. Next-generation applications will always require more bandwidth, so we must use every wire available to provide as much bandwidth as possible. In practice, this means that most of the times you'll use power lines as the only wired connection, but in some case you may use coaxial cables and phone lines to provide extra bandwidth. Leaving those "clean lines" unused would be a waste of available capacity.

The trend to use more than one wire has already started. ITU-T (the standardization organization responsible for creating all DSL and VDSL standards) has created a group with the goal of designing a specification that will work over any wire with a target PHY data rate of 1 Gbps. Actual throughput will be medium-dependent (today's tentative targets are achieving 400 Mbps in 99% of coaxial cable connections and 250 Mbps in 98% of powerline connections), to reflect the fact that some lines are "cleaner" than others.

More data that confirms the trend; Coppergate (a HomePNA vendor) recently announced that it had bought Conexant's powerline group, in order to get access to high-speed technology and be better positioned for the G.HN standard. Leading silicon vendors have been recently making active contributions to ITU-T G.HN; DS2, Intel, Panasonic, Infineon, Texas Instruments, Coppergate, Intellon, Broadcom, and many others. Even leading service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and France Telecom are active members, pushing for the group to finish the most important parts of the standard by the end of this year.

On April 29, a group of companies (including DS2, Intel, Panasonic, Infineon, Texas Instruments and six others) announced the creation of the HomeGrid Forum, with the goal of:

1. Accelerating the creation of a "single-PHY/single-MAC" standard at ITU-T G.HN for powerline/coax/phoneline
2. Ensuring fast market adoption, and
3. Ensuring interoperability.

The important thing here is the "single-PHY/single-MAC" mention. This is the reason why everybody should support it, as compared to other "dual-PHY/dual-MAC" proposals being pushed at IEEE P1901 (see "How to Kill The Home Networking Industry" for more information).

How will this convergence affect the wired home networking market? As I said before, today's technologies serve today's market well, but next-generation technologies (i.e. G.HN/HomeGrid) will accelerate the convergence to a single standard that will work in "any wire, anywhere in your home" and will increase the total market size from "millions of units" to "hundreds of millions of units" per year.

For consumers, this will mean that they won't have to choose between 5 different (and non-interoperable) technical approaches for solving the same problem. One single technology will do it all. And given the large number of silicon vendors actively working in G.HN/HomeGrid, consumers will have many different (but interoperable) products to choose from.

Chano Gómez
DS2