Powerline Networking: Hotwired Or Unplugged?

Long-time print and online readers already know that I regularly discuss the topic of powerline networking, primarily with a LAN slant (although broadband services delivered by power utilities are also conceptually quite intriguing to me). As such, I’d like to draw your attention to two recent coverage pieces:

• My interview with Mark Hazen at Intellon, which appeared in EDN’s May 15th issue’s Voices section. If you’ve only seen the print version of the writeup, I encourage you to hit the link to check out the much more indepth online edition. Note that my interview with Mark concluded prior to the powerline industry (and FCC’s) latest scuffle with ham radio operators (who, in the post-9/11 era, wield substantially more power than they might have previously held).
• The Voices interview was a followup to my earlier discussion with DS2’s Chano Gómez. Speaking of which, check out the latest How We See CE blog post, from Chano. He’d been planning it for a while now, and some of the points his competitor Mark made prompted Chano to wrap up his writeup.

I daresay I agree with Chano’s big-picture themes, both conceptually and from past personal powerline experience. A standard filled with multiple incompatible options is no standard from a practical sense. I really do wish that, like LG and Samsung, and unlike Blu-ray and HD DVD, the dueling and currently incompatible powerline technology providers could find some way to bridge their ideology and implementation differences and come up with a common (and uncomplicated) approach going forward. Powerline networking holds compelling conceptual appeal, which is why I follow it as closely as I do, but a lingering proprietary nature substantially mutes its potential. Granted, commoditization would suppress per-unit profit margins, but as I most recently argued by analogy three weeks back, the resultant broadening of the market would more than compensate from total revenue and profit standpoints.

p.s…regarding last week’s powerline networking problems, the root cause ended up being that my existing adapters (whose firmware Intellon had previously updated on my behalf) somehow ended up with blank encryption passwords. As such, they could see each other, but they couldn’t interact with additional off-the-shelf adapters that were using the default ‘HomePlugAV’ password. After I fired up an Intellon-provided utility and set the passwords on the existing adapters to ‘HomePlugAV’, they conversed with the additional adapters just fine.