HomePNA Blog

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.