HomePNA Blog

Gigle First to Claim the Really High Ground

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

You’ve probably heard that Gigle Semiconductor has claimed the high ground; launching the “World's First Gigabit Home Networking Chip”. No doubt about it, they are good. So what’s Gigle’s all-important user throughput. I don’t know BUT I heard that Belkin adapters, the first products using the chip, are available so we’ll know soon. We’ll also know more about Gigle’s proprietary “mediaxtream”, the technology giving them the boost over Homeplug AV data rates.

The big question is whether Gigle will be able to convince large service providers to use proprietary technology (especially with all the service provider interest in ITU G.hn’s Gigabit standard). If they want it to be selected they really need an open standard. I remember way-back-when that Gigle proposed something to G.hn but it wasn’t included in the G.9960 PHY standard.  There are other standards groups in the world so if they are willing then who knows.

On to the small print. Gigle claims speeds up to 1000Mbps but there’s an asterisk and a note that 1000Mbps is the “ideal physical data rate” and actual data throughput and distance will be lower, depending on interference, network traffic, building materials, and other conditions”.

OK, we all play marketing games. That’s why I use phrases like “up to” when I write about data rates. It’s not my fault. Editors and analysts make me do it. Speed sells and it’s a lot easier than trying to explain user throughput. So … what it means is that the chip produces Gigabit speeds in the lab and maybe on a tester. In the real world you start with the real data rate which is pretty much guaranteed to be lower than a Gigabit and then start subtracting off the overhead.

The overhead depends on the encoding technology – the ways the digital data bits are “encoded” for transmission. Usually some user data bits are encoded into more bits for transmission on the media; be it phone wire, coax, powerline, Ethernet cable or air. There are other transmission taxes related to the way the technology deals with interference and other real world nasties. And then you subtract the MAC overhead – the gaps, address fields, error correction etc. Some MACs (like HomePNA 3.1) are very efficient. Others aren’t. What you have left is the real data throughput. And if you are lucky it will be stable. If you are unlucky it will vary all over the place depending on interference etc.

So the devil is in the details.  But this is old news – it’s the reason that major North American service providers prefer coax and phone wires over wireless Wi-Fi and powerline for distributing triple play services in the home. And while we’re on the subject, the ITU G.hn is meeting this week. What’s on the agenda? Cleaning up the draft and converging toward final consent in Geneva. Gigle is first but that may or may not be important in the long run.

Global IPTV Growth Reported and U-verse adds features

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Check out the latest press release on the Broadband Forum’s website announcing the results of a new market study. Predictably the report, which was prepared for the Forum by Point Topic, shows great growth in broadband worldwide in the midst of a severe economic downturn. What thrilled (but didn’t surprise) us was the even greater growth of IPTV with North America number two behind Western Europe in total IPTV deployments but growing twice as fast – is it that compelling IPTV value proposition?

And don’t forget, IPTV is young and the technology is evolving daily. Industry groups like the Broadband Forum continue to develop and refine guidelines which leverage home networking technology to allow service providers to offer IPTV. We like the Broadband Forum and their standards. Any technology that simplifies, standardizes, or enhances a service provider’s ability to provide broadband and IPTV services is good for our members.

In related news (note the smooth segue), our favorite son AT&T announced enhancements to its U-verse services. Chief among those is a new DVR feature “the company believes is unique: the ability to schedule and manage recordings from any U-verse receiver in a multi-room DVR installation (instead of from the DVR receiver room only)”. The new feature is a software upgrade that will be enabled while you sleep. In the words of Jeff Weber, vice president of video services for AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, “with AT&T U-verse, you’re getting DVR capabilities you can’t find from any cable providers … we’re giving you an advanced entertainment experience, and this is still only the beginning.”

Nearly 10 million HomePNA Chipsets Shipped

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

I hope you didn't miss the recent article "HomePNA chipsets enable smart home entertainment networking” by Eran Gureshnik, product line manager of HomePNA products at our favorite-son home networking chip supplier CopperGate Communications.

The article discusses how HomePNA 3.1 has improved business opportunities for service providers and entertainment options for end users. “These days, the answer to “What’s new on TV?” is far more than a list of sitcoms, dramas, and reality shows. Interactive bidirectional TV is elevating the viewing experience with offerings like AT&T’s U-verse, an IPTV service featuring video on demand, Voice over IP (VoIP), Total Home DVR, and more. A recent report from ABI Research states that demand for IPTV service will increase by an estimated 32 percent annually over the next six years to nearly 79 million global subscribers by the end of 2014.[1]”. Further, “Today, four out of the five largest IPTV-deploying telcos in North America have selected HomePNA and are installing it at a rate of 120,000 homes per month. CopperGate Communications has shipped nearly 10 million HomePNA chipsets”.

It also discusses the technical challenges involved in delivering triple-play broadband services and the way HomePNA 3.1, an ITU standard and the first multi-wire home networking standard, has paved the way for significant progress in IPTV with chips that reliably stream data, voice, and video over existing coax and phone wires. Included are features such as Limited Automatic Repeat reQuest (LARQ), a technique first used by the HomePNA SIG in the HomePNA 2 standard to compensate for high impulse noise which is known to cause frequent frame damage.

Service Providers Driving Home Network Shipments

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Well, I admit it. I like good news. Especially the kind that supports trends we’ve been predicting and reporting (ever notice how similar brag is to blog?).

A new report from market analyst Joyce Putcher at In-Stat entitled “2Wire, Huawei, and Thomson Make Major Gains across Broadband CPE Market Share Segments” provides more evidence that the basic dynamics of the home networking equipment market is changing.  Or is the correct term “maturing”?

Is it competition from TelcoTV service providers? Is it telecom evolving into a three network (hint to the Adult ADD crowd, the home network is the third) network? Is it home networks enabling service providers to add new customers and increase ARPU (a smutty sounding acronym for Average Revenue Per Customer) with new features like whole-home DVRs and remote diagnostics or new services like home technical support? Are other parts of the home networking equipment market saturating? Is it because music downloads and other popular “traditional” applications run pretty well on older Wi-Fi home networks?

In the words of a friend from one of the headline companies “Thanks! Now we just have to keep it up, but it just goes to show that the Telcos will win the home networking war in the long run”. And need we mention; they will need to have a fast and robust home network like HomePNA in the boxes.

ITU's G.hn Keeps Sailing

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

It was easier to get a scoop in the old days when I could count the number of G.hn evangelists on no hands. Now-a-days it’s hard – what with friends and colleagues at other companies and forums issuing PRs and blogging enthusiastically about the great progress.

So, if I can’t be first … here’s my take on the latest milestone. As you probably heard, G.hn has settled on some "Baseline Text" for most of the protocol pieces that lie upstream of the G.9960 G.hn PHY standard finalized last December. These pieces, collectively called the Data Link Layer or DLL, together with the PHY make the existing wire home network appear to the outside world like a common Ethernet LAN. The beauty of this approach is that the processor in the consumer premises equipment (service provider talk for the set-top boxes, residential gateway, and other equipment they install in the home) uses standard proven Ethernet software to communicate over the G.hn home network.

This isn’t a new idea – HomePNA and others already do it and the devil is, as always, in the details. The clean slate approach taken by G.hn developers – which at this point are largely engineers from companies with extensive experience developing existing wire home networking technology - allowed them to take advantage best-of-breed approaches and implementations as well as new technology.

Pretty sentiments and noteworthy progress but there is still a lot of work to be done to get Consent in the two to three meetings planned between now and September. There are still multiple approaches to be resolved, decisions to be made on what is required and what is optional, politics to be played (more than before, much less than expected), and new technology decisions to be made to get from here to there. The participants I talk to are uniformly positive that they will get to Consent on the complete standard at the SG15 meeting in Geneva this September.

New Home Networking Market Report

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Like any good marketing dweeb (yes there are many definitions of “dweeb, none of them complimentary) I read the announcement of a new home networking market study by In-Stat analyst Joyce Putscher with both interest and fear. Interest because she may have succeeded in distilling a few nuggets of wisdom from the hype we marketing types throw at her; and fear that she gave sweeter ink to the competition (and also joy that she didn’t spell out the HomePNA acronym – we’ve been trying squelch it since the turn of the century when it became apparent that the initial interest driving the use of HomePNA in North America was COAX and then phone wires in that order).

“Over the next few years, service providers will drive the growth of in-home networks” and “Two segregated home networks (HN) have been evolving – a service provider-centric network, and a PC-centric network. Each is leveraging different business models and technologies” caught my eye. I believe the first – and not just because it gives my life meaning. The second, I’m not so sure.

As I blogged last week, trade groups focused on the transmission media, such as HomePNA, MOCA, HomePlug, and Wi-Fi (often referred to as the PHY for Physical Interface layer) and industry groups focused on higher layers such as the Broadband Forum and DLNA often work together and may share representatives driving a lot of information sharing. And remember, those representatives are employees of stakeholders -- communication companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, service providers, and other interested parties. 

Given that a home network such as HomePNA incorporates guaranteed quality of service which, as discussed many blogs ago, is designed for triple-play and can transport a variety of data types without degrading time sensitive revenue bearing services like IPTV and VoIP, the technology is there waiting for those cross-pollinating standards people to build the usage models and recommendations to simplify your networked life.  And going on it is, but that doesn't mean it will be adopted.  So, my take is an assertive maybe. 

Broadband and IP/MPLS Forums Get Married

By Rich Nesin, HomePNA general manager and resident philosopher.

If you use the Internet, and who reading this blog doesn’t, then you are using both the core and access networks (and you may even be using a home network). Five years ago it was two networks now it’s three -- home networks have gained respect in the telecommunications world.  The core is a very high speed mostly fiber central communication network that carries data from access provider to access provider. The access network connects users to the core network and the home network (my favorite!) connects devices in the home to the access network.

All of these networks are based on accessible practices and technologies of some kind; standards from standards groups such as the ITU or specifications and recommendations from industry groups such as the Broadband Forum and the IP/MPLS Forum.  Industry groups often offer certification testing to insure that products perform correctly (which is why, for example, it's so important to only use HomePNA products that have passed HomePNA certification testing, DSL modems that have passed Broadband Forum testing, etc.).

So where is this blog going?  If you're involved in telecommunications you probably heard that the Broadband Forum merged with the IP/MPLS Forum. If you haven’t heard, this is a good thing. There are a lot of industry and standards groups and they develop a lot of documents. Sometimes different groups will develop their own practices for the same application. A lot of effort goes into developing liaisons between the groups so they can share information freely. Sometimes the collaborations work and sometimes they don’t.

In this case there was a lot of interest and membership overlap between the IP/MPLS Forum and the much larger Broadband Forum. The standards world is a small one and you tend to see the same people attending meetings for different groups so merging them makes a lot of sense. Why it’s a good thing …. well that’s another story.

Content is King

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, director, HomePNA Marketing and PR

Cliché usually derives from some nugget of truth – and in this case it seems the cliché should be, “Content is HomePNA’s friend.” It seems the growth of all forms of content is fueling the change in consumer viewing habits, as ABI Research reported an emerging trend towards TV viewed online. Online video will help drive overall adoption of video delivered to the living room. Since HomePNA provides the global standard to distribute home networking over phone line and coax, we can safely assume that as viewers grow from 563 million at the end of 2008 to 941 million by 2013, our fortunate members will enjoy the fringe benefits of said growth. So, really content is “everybody’s” friend in our ecosystem of members.

Old Dogs Really Hate New Tricks!

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, director, HomePNA Marketing and PR

We’re apparently a bit stubborn when it comes to giving up our old television sets or at least getting them digital-ready by June 22, the digital-transition date. Apparently 3.5 million U.S. households still are classified as “completely unready” for the transition, according to Nielsen’s National People Meter research. These stubborn traditional television lovers either hold out for the sake of some endurance trick or pure procrastination – either way June 22 will come round and what will they do when the “snow” starts to fall? Scream and bang on ancient TV set. Of course, in our world where our loyal following has already embraced digital television long before the government set forth the “new rule,” we’ll all happily watch our digital TV, eat a few kernels of popcorn, and ruefully laugh at our stubborn neighbors, as the old set crashes through their windows. “Stupid TV!” Oh yeah…

Network-Connected Device Market – The Place to Be “Working” It

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, director, HomePNA Marketing and PR

Strong revenue reports coming out of the network-connected media device market bode well for the overall home networking marketplace this year despite the worldwide recession. You can get excited about ABI Research’s  new report forecasting that total revenues from network-connected devices will rise from $74 billion this year to over $94 billion in 2010. “Network connected media devices such as game consoles, TVs, and set-top boxes offer an opportunity for ‘core networking’ companies to reorient themselves away from a declining market,” says ABI Senior Analyst Jason Blackwell.

This news comes on the heels of AT&T’s recent announcement (which we faithfully bragged about last week) that their U-Verse subscriber rates grew at a nice clip last quarter. News out of these sectors indicates that the home networking market in general is not suffering at the hands of a bad economy – and since some news analysts suggest the economy may bottom out soon – the future continues to look bright. Members of HomePNA that provide home-networked connected devices have something to smile about. If you haven’t become a member and your company isn’t thriving right now, look at the opportunity – it’s absolutely where the market is growing.