HomePNA Blog

EXFO's Triple-Play Tester Selected by Three North American Network Operators

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Have you ever made a dumb mistake? When I see product announcements like this one from HomePNA member EXFO I am reminded (once again) that we should have changed the name of HomePNA to something else - like HPNA (one suggestion was to change the name from HomePNA to “To Wall” since that's what many of the connectors that attach to HomePNA networks are labeled).

EXFO’s AXS-200/635 is, in their words, “the ideal choice for network operators, since a single unit includes 30 MHz, single-ended wideband copper testing to fully validate broadband deployments as well as voice, data and proven IPTV analysis/testing capabilities over established DSL, Ethernet and HPNA links.” There’s that HPNA again.

So whether you call it HomePNA or HPNA we’re pleased that there is another certified solution available to service providers. The anecdotal evidence about the importance of testing during triple-play installation continues to roll in. Testing is the best way to identify problems - such as poor coax connectors that may have been adequate for analog cable service but don’t make the cut for digital services like digital cable service or HomePNA - and HomePNA's protocol was designed to facilitate in-home testing. Better to replace that connector today and avoid the service call tomorrow.

AT&T U-verse TV Hits 2 Million – And TV is Still King

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

I hope you saw AT&T’s announcement Thursday that it will “reach its 2 millionth AT&T U-verse TV customer today”. Good for them and good for us - and we can now safely assume that AT&T provides TV service to over 2 million households. In the last year, AT&T has added one million TV customers and the service is available to millions of additional homes across 22 states. And, as faithful readers know, AT&T U-verse TV is the only 100 percent IPTV service offered by a national service provider making U-verse (in AT&T’s words) one of the most dynamic and feature-rich services available today.

Well I believe - and have spent a lot of time evangelizing the promise of IPTV technology. And with all the buzz about OTT video it’s important to keep in mind that U-verse TV is not OTT video. It’s TV service that leverages the capabilities of IP technology-- and TV service from service providers is still the 800 pound gorilla. Telecompetitor’s Bernie Aronson put it well in a recent column when he observed “Probably the most glaring finding of this [Nielsen Q309 A2/M2™ Three Screen Report] report is that 99% of all video viewing in the U.S. still happens on a traditional television. That finding seems to suggest that subscription video services are far from any immediate danger of bypass."

That’s not to say it won’t change since, as Bernie notes, “The trends in video are unmistakable. Customers are consuming video in different ways, across multiple screens. Video service providers will need to continue to study these trends and ensure their offering adapts to these demands.”  However, from telephones to cable TV, the service providers have been the ones that made technology accessible to the masses. So who today is better positioned to bring all that OTT video to your TV?

More Telcos, More (and faster) IPTV Deployments

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

If you have been following this blog (and I hope you do) you may recall that I’ve mentioned that the telcos' interest IPTV has been increasing dramatically. I saw it at FTTH, IP Possibilities, and especially at the HomePNA Summit which attracted more telcos than equipment manufacturers. Yesterday, HomePNA board member Motorola  announced  a win at Farmers Telephone Cooperative. Being HomePNA (aka HPNA) centric, we immediately noticed that it includes their VIP1200 IP Set-top boxes which, we are happy to say, features HomePNA for home networking over coax (and, also needless to say, is HomePNA certified).

Ignoring the hype that I get paid to write, the technology really is maturing rapidly. CED Magazine ran an article last month about Bell Aliant that stated they “can comfortably get a couple of TV installs done in a day, and we’ve created enough buffer zone that our technicians can pick up another piece of work, whether it’s a TV trouble call or another high-speed install. We’ve gone from struggling to get two pieces of work done a day to comfortably getting three pieces of work done a day.” A far call from the six or seven hour installs we heard about a couple years ago. The HomePNA technology hasn’t changed so you can bet that this is mostly a result of experience, better installation procedures, diagnostic equipment and increased testing.

U-verse Doing It's Part For AT&T

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

It’s nice to see good news such as “AT&T’s profits soar on wireless, U-verse revenues” about a member, especially when it involves your technology and increases other members’ shipments.

“But according to Ralph de la Vega, AT&T’s president and CEO of Mobility and Consumer Markets, it wasn’t just the iPhone that helped drive AT&T’s success this quarter. De la Vega said that the carrier’s shrinking churn rate was due in part to the company’s IP-based U-verse service and subsequent triple- and quad-plays offerings, which seem to have been successful in driving revenue per household and customer retention.” Good news and something that shouldn’t go away when the iPhone exclusivity ends.

And, speaking of quad play …. If you weren’t aware, I’m a fan of TelcoTV. I live in PA so naturally I called Verizon to see if FIOS was available yet (I know they use MOCA and not HomePNA but nobody’s perfect). A very pleasant and helpful Verizon customer service representative searched for, but unfortunately couldn’t find, my house -- even though they have been providing my wireless service for years. Oh well, maybe someday. (While driving the other day I saw a billboard for CenturyLink near my house - and they use HomePNA for their TV service).

HomePNA Gets (even more) Real

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

It’s been a busy week. The first half was spent staffing the HomePNA demo in the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) conference. Good demo, great interest, and some interesting applications and products I’ll write about soon.

Thursday was the HomePNA Summit. We had over 100 attendees, half from service providers, and some really great sessions. I’m a marketing type so I don’t get insulted when you don’t believe every piece of earnest hyperbole that I pound into my keyboard, but nothing cuts through the hype like respected telcos and satellite TV providers such as CenturyLink, Bell Aliant, AT&T, TELUS, Telefonica, Tata Sky and yes talking about their own real life experiences with home networking technology – getting the install times down and customer satisfaction up. No really, don’t take my word for it. Read Carol Wilson’s article “HED: HomePNA driving down install times”  in Telephony Magazine. She quotes real numbers, real times and actionable advice.

And please read the HomePNA PR about the Summit. Service providers are joining HomePNA as we continue to gain momentum in triple play home networking. And not just in North America; it’s being adopted worldwide thanks to robust operation over both coax and phone wires.

And while you’re at it, don't miss Jim Barthold article in CED magazine “Beyond the Triple Play” that ran yesterday. Jim describes Bell Aliant’s experience establishing leading triple play services and their plans for the future. Good reading.

Home Network Management – an Activity Enabled by a Platform

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Six or seven years ago who would have thought that service providers would not only consider home networks to be part of their network but would want to manage them? Well they sure do now. According to an article in Billing and OSS World magazine last week, the home network enables service providers to partake in a host of other applications that span from utilities to health care. And lest we forget that pesky need to reduce service costs and especially minimize the number of service calls. This isn’t exactly news but neither is the requirement for remote monitoring and management – essential to providing a stable home network for these applications.

So today, instead of evangelists (like me) spinning the story, we have technologists and product managers at leading service providers like Verizon (who use MOCA for home networking) and TELUS (who use HomePNA) describing their plans for the home network.

By coincidence, I was discussing the very same topic last week with a respected engineer at another equally well known leading telco that uses HomePNA for its’ triple play IPTV service. He told me that, from their operations center, he had diagnosed a home networking problem in his boss’s house down to a loose coax connector on one of the set-top boxes. Turns out the boss had previously detached the connector while he was working on his entertainment center. Connector tightened; problem solved. The fix was verified by a quick to the operations center and, most importantly, no service call was required.

Well one reason (as my friend the engineer will tell you) that this particular service provider choose HomePNA was the attention to integrated remote diagnostics and management capabilities (and we at HomePNA believe that HomePNA 3.1 has best in class capabilities). And one reason for this blog is to talk about how this stuff is real and a lot of it is integrated into the residential gateways, set-top boxes and other equipment being installed being in customers’ homes today.

CenturyLink joins Telcos AT&T, Telefonica, TELUS and Bell Aliant at HomePNA Summit September 30 to October 1

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Timing is everything. Here we are, hard at work organizing the HomePNA Summit, and analyst firm Strategy Analytics helps us out with a new report forecasting that the US IPTV market will grow from 5M subscribers in 2009 to around 15.5M by 2013. That’s moving from under 5% of the total television households to 13% in 2013. As the report says “The entrance of the Telcos into the television game has created new and significant competition for the traditional pay television platforms”. Good news for HomePNA which has become the standard home networking technology for North American TelcoTV.

It’s good timing too. CenturyLink has joined other leading telcos at the HomePNA Summit September 30 to October 1 and will be speaking about their experiences deploying HomePNA technology for IPTV. CenturyLink, one of the leading communication companies in the United States, was formed earlier this year by the merger of CenturyTel and EMBARQ. It has operations in 33 states, around 7.3M access lines, and over 2.1M broadband customers.

The HomePNA Summit, which is especially drawing service providers to it’s audience in addition to equipment manufacturers and system integrators will be held September 30 to October 1, 2009 in Houston, TX co-located with the FTTH conference and expo. Come hear how leading communications companies such as telcos AT&T, Telefonica, TELUS, Bell Aliant, and CenturyLink; satellite providers Tata Sky and YES; and cable leader Digicable use HomePNA home networking to enable new IP based services.

G.hn Home Network Standard – Not Quite Smooth Sailing

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Well fun times for all you ITU G.hn watchers. As I wrote back in June, G.hn has settled on some "Baseline Text" for most of the protocol pieces that lie upstream of the G.9960 G.hn PHY (which anybody that follows G.hn can tell you was consented last December). So … here’s to more smooth sailing in the standards body. Did I hear a “not quite”? True, the group is moving briskly toward consent at the September 28 to October 9 meeting in Geneva , however it seems everyone isn’t running in the same direction.

So what’s happening? It’s gotten more contentious, that's what. At the G.hn meeting in Concord, Ca last week, some of the attendees (guess who) introduced a contribution to add compatibility between HomePlug and G.hn. If you’ve been following the evolution of the standard, you probably remember the decision made long-ago to work for co-existence with existing technologies, not compatibility. That decision was pragmatic and probably prevented a HomePlug-UPA-HD-PLC-MOCA-HomePNA (did I leave anyone out?) shootout that could have killed, or at least maimed, the new G.hn all-wire standard effort. The changes proposed last week would have affected both the MAC and PHY in fairly significant ways and may have posed a problem for the one chip-all wire goal.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the group’s historical reticence to require compatibility with other home networking technologies combined with major angst over anything that could delay completion of the final drafts caused even some participants who planned to stay neutral at the meeting to dissent. The contribution was presented, debated, dissected, debated some more and, in the end, fell far short of consensus for technical and practical reasons. Is it smooth sailing from here on? Can’t say for sure as all eyes (or at least the ones that care enough to read this blog) turn to Geneva. It’s not over till it’s over and then the market will decide.

Broadband Services – Is it the Turning Point

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

I recommend you check out “Broadband Services: The Turning Point”, a new (and free) whitepaper from Parks Associates. Like some of their other papers, this one is rich with direct customer data (of course the questions, analysis, and conclusions are Parks’). One interesting item that doesn’t surprise me is that bundles correlate to higher customer satisfaction. HomePNA is all about enabling bundled services and we see the interest from service providers every day.  It also states that a higher percentage of fiber broadband customers subscribe to bundles than cable or DSL customers – and that fiber broadband customers are the most satisfied. I guess you have to buy the complete paper to see why but we can guess.

The paper also holds that half of the US broadband households are not aware of the broadband speed they are receiving.  Not too surprising to a Speedtest  addict like me -- you measure a blazing 16 Mbps downstream rate and then see videos downloading at 300Kbps.

And I’m betting these trends will continue -- especially as service providers like AT&T start to leverage their bundles (AT&T announced last week that it is offering its first discounted wireless-U-Verse bundle ). And, as we’ve seen before, a highly satisfied customer is much more likely to stay than a satisfied customer; while a highly dissatisfied customer is much more likely to leave than a merely dissatisfied one.

As the market shakes out and service providers achieve the high quality “core services” and bundles they need to compete, Parks (and I) think the focus will move to the value add services. This is where they will really be able to differentiate – and by doing a lot more than allowing a few over-the –top applications.

Major Indian Cable TV Provider DigiCable joins AT&T, Telefonica and others at HomePNA Summit

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

The HomePNA Summit has just added another major speaker to its’ service provider line-up. DigiCable, one of India largest cable TV suppliers, joins leading international, national and regional telcos AT&T , Telefonica, TELUS, and Bell Aliant , and Satellite service providers Tata Sky  and YES as speakers at the event.

The Summit, which also features major equipment suppliers and system integrators such as Cisco and Motorola, showcases the momentum and appeal of HomePNA technology to service providers of all sizes and types all over the world.

The HomePNA Summit, which is especially drawing service providers to it’s audience in addition to equipment manufacturers and system integrators interested in learning about these companies’ experience with HomePNA, will be held September 30 to October 1, 2008 in Houston, TX co-located with the FTTH conference and expo .