Home Transportation: Truth In Marketing
This blog post references my cover story ‘Home Transportation: Benchmarking Powerline, 802.11, and Ethernet‘ in EDN’s August 2, 2007 edition. It’s one of a series of web addendums to the print writeup.
I was admittedly being sarcastic (albeit, I’d argue, with good reason) when, in the main article, I pointed out of the three ‘200 Mbps’ powerline camps’ technologies:
The three contenders’ products all embed 100-Mbit Ethernet transceivers. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about the disparity between marketing claims and real-life performance capabilities.
To further elaborate on this issue, I’ll reprint a portion of an inflammatory blog post I crafted earlier this year during the CONNECTIONS conference. Consider my three-month-back words in light of this hands-on project’s benchmarking results.
I was reminded of my breakfast conversation with Linksys (who has launched products based on the HomePlug AV powerline networking standard) yesterday, and with NETGEAR (whose powerline networking products are based on DS2 silicon) this morning. Both company’s devices, as well as those of Panasonic, claim ~"200 Mbps" bandwidth. But, as my past testing of DS2, HD-PLC, HomePlug 1.0 and HomePlug 1.0 Turbo consistently reveals, the technologies deliver far lower throughput than their touted PHY rates would otherwise suggest.
Linksys and NETGEAR both gave me the answer to my "what about that disparity?" question that, from my past conversations with powerline backers, I suspected I’d hear…."we’re no different than wireless or any other networking technology". And, in a sense, they’re right; anyone who’s used 802.11b or a/g can agree that the marketed 11 Mbps and 54 Mbps data rates aren’t achievable in real-life conditions. But whereas with wireless you might get around half the promoted PHY rate, with powerline it’s more like one-fifth…..or one-tenth. That is, if it even works at all. Plus, DS2, HD-PLC and HomePlug AV are completely incompatible; not only won’t they inter-communicate, they won’t even "gracefully coexist". Adding one powerline technology to a LAN that’s already got a powerline spur based on another powerline technology will bring down both powerline segments.
If I was in DS2, the HomePlug Powerline Association and/or Panasonic’s shoes, I’d be redoubling my efforts right about now to put aside partisan differences and craft a compatibility compromise that also encompasses realistic performance claims. Otherwise, this finicky but still extremely promising (by virtue of its ubiquity) interconect technology might not ever leave the launch pad, constrained by greedy lawyers and their clients.
The high-performance powerline market frankly is a mess right now, albeit with some geographic segmentation. Analysts tell me that Panasonic’s HD-PLC technology is dominant in Asia, not surprising given that the supplier’s headquarters are in Japan. Similarly, Spain-based DS2 and its UPA approach currently has the lion’s share of Europe’s business, while Intellon-dominated HomePlug reigns supreme in the Americas. Peruse major networking equipment suppliers’ product offerings and you’ll encounter tremendous inconsistency, reflective of powerline networking’s immaturity and consequent uncertainty:
- Belkin marketed HomePlug 1.0-based products but, to date, has not announced devices based on any faster technology
- Buffalo sells both HD-PLC and UPA ‘200 Mbps’ gear
- D-Link offers UPA-based equipment
- Linksys markets HomePlug AV-based adapters
- NETGEAR sells devices based on HomePlug 1.0 (unveiled first), HomePlug 1.0 Turbo (most recently) and UPA (unveiled second)
Remember, folks, the only cross-technology interoperability is between HomePlug 1.0 and HomePlug 1.0 Turbo, and that at lowest-common-denominator HomePlug 1.0 speeds. How a vendor with incompatible technologies within the same product category deals with the inevitable consumer confusion in a still-profitable manner is beyond me.
I’d like to particularly focus on NETGEAR with respect to this post’s ‘truth in marketing’ theme. The company’s WGX102 powerline adapter embeds a ‘54 Mbps’ 802.11g transceiver. It’s a slick idea for adding an access point to your network….but the company mates the Wi-Fi circuitry to a ‘14 Mbps’ HomePlug 1.0 transceiver. Pragmatically, I understand why NETGEAR made this choice. By the time the WGX102 entered the market, ‘11 Mbps’ 802.11b gear was passé; designing in and trumpeting the WGX102’s 802.11g capability was the only way that it’d sell. The NETGEAR representative I met with at CONNECTIONS took great pains to point out to me that the company marketed the product as a ‘wireless range extender’, not an ‘access point’. Still, I still can’t get past the fact that HomePlug 1.0 puts a performance choke on the device’s wireless potential….a bottleneck that’s not clearly explained to consumers.
Todd Krein commented:
Gary commented:
