HomePNA Blog

HomePNA Announces First Technology Summit

August 4, 2009 – The HomePNA Alliance today announces its first Technology Summit to be held September 30 and October 1, 2009 in Houston Texas.  The Summit, which is also being promoted by the FTTH Council, will be co-located with the 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo. The Summit will focus on technical and business insights surrounding HomePNA technology and its role in enabling an advanced digital home experience for end users.

The Summit will feature speakers from among the world’s largest service providers, including AT&T, Telefonica, YES, TELUS, Tata Sky and Bell Aliant who will discuss HomePNA’s role in creating compelling and competitive home networking and IPTV product portfolios for their respective companies.  At the Technology Summit, Cisco, Motorola, CopperGate Communications and other leaders will also give their perspectives on the technology that so many service providers have adopted due to its fast performance and rich features desired by service providers.

Maximizing profits in the evolving IPTV marketplace

“Service providers of all types and sizes across the globe are focused on the great opportunities provided by triple play, digital entertainment and interactivity – all applications enabled by a robust home network,” said Bill Simmelink, HomePNA president.  “The most effective approach to providing a high-performance home network uses existing wires, and the

Summit will explore why the HomePNA standard provides the best path and opportunities for maximizing the benefits of this huge new opportunity.”

“Service providers learn best from other service providers. The HomePNA Summit will offer a truly global service provider perspective on this important and evolving trend,” said Bernie Arnason of Pivot Media, a co-producer of the event.

 

HomePNA technology is the highest-performing home network standard today, delivering a quality video experience for viewers while enabling service providers to reduce installation costs, utilize remote management and diagnostics to reduce operational expenses, and even reduce end-user costs through unified billing.  Over 10 million HomePNA chipsets have been shipped.  Each week, 30,000 homes add HomePNA-based networks worldwide - with over 40 service providers.

HomePNA Shipments Hit 10M and Why

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

When you see an article by Rami Verbin, Chief Technical Officer at CopperGate Communications, it’s well worth the read.

In the article, entitled “HomePNA: No New Wires”, Rami discusses the convergence of TV and IP enabled broadband-delivered digital entertainment and communication inside the home. “Consumers are spending more time watching TV and Internet video … The question is how do consumers easily route entertainment throughout their entire house?”

If you’ve been following this blog you can probably guess the answer is “by using existing phone or coax wiring”. The article explores the distinction between home networks and home entertainment networks, outlines trade-offs of various approaches, and then goes into the technical details of HomePNA explaining why the technology is especially well suited to this application and the integration of HomePNA into consumer devices.

We love validation and some appeared today in an email from InStat announcing a new report “North American Households with Home Networking over Coax & Phone Wiring to Double in Two Years”. According to InStat, “Nearly 2/3 of consumer respondents from In-Stat’s survey expressed an interest in watching Internet Video on their TV” and “two segregated home networks have been evolving– a service provider-centric network, and a PC-centric network. Each is leveraging different business models and technologies.”

And while we are on the subject of rapid service-provider-deployed-entertainment-home-network-market-growth (try saying that three times fast), after months of hint-dropping, Coppergate recently announced that it has shipped over 10 Million HomePNA chipsets. The compelling benefit of HomePNA technology and existing wire home networking was well summarized by Kevin Hastings, Chief Architect, Digital Broadcast Services at Bell Aliant when he said “CopperGate’s HomePNA technology helped Bell Aliant cut install times by more than 30 percent.” “Shorter install times helped us reduce our customer wait time for installation from a month down to the next business day. This has given us a competitive edge in this market.”

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.

IEEE P1901 – Is the Opera Truly Over?

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Well the season finale of my favorite soap, how the IEEE turns, has aired. And what a season it was! Now it’s time for everyone to live happily ever after (at least they would if I wrote the script, three years to get to a draft spec is enough).

If you’re familiar with how the IEEE developed the elegant two PHY P1901 proposal, then you may not be surprised that the approved version includes not two but three PHYs. That’s right. Despite defeating a previous bid to use the ITU’s G.hn PHY for P1901, the final compromise proposal includes G.hn in addition to Intellon’s HomePlug AV Panasonic’s HD-PLC PHYs.

The inside story is that the P1901 proposals squeaked by and may well have been headed for another defeat. The addition of the G.hn PHY saved the day by drawing new supporters (including G.hn pioneer Coppergate Communications who voted yes for the first time).

So this is great for everyone, right, a real win-win? I certainly hope so but there are nasty rumors circulating about it being a political ruse and behind the scenes efforts taking place to remove G.hn from the IEEE P1901 draft standard. The industry took a giant step forward when G.hn was added to P1901 and now it’s time for the IEEE to walk the walk and do the right thing for everyone.

HomePNA's New President

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, Director, HomePNA Marketing

Many of you may already be aware but we have a new president! His name is William "Bill" Simmelink and he is president of HomePNA promoter company CopperGate Communications. Bill recently assumed the position vacated by our friend Rich Nesin who is now doing consulting and will continue to provide marketing services for HomePNA. Bill has been a member of the HomePNA board of directors since 2006. Before CopperGate, Simmelink was general manager of the packet voice and video business at Texas Instruments and vice president of business development at Telogy Networks, one of the industry's pioneers and strongest players in Voice-over-IP, acquired by Texas Instruments in 1999.

We don't expect any dramatic changes now that Bill has assumed the reins. We will certainly continue to blog to all of readers. Bill's goals are to continue to help retain and recruit prospective members and continue the transformation of HomePNA into a really effective user community. We've recently picked up several new members, which we will announce very soon. And with AT&T heading toward 1 million subscribers by year's end, we firmly believe our ecosystem of members will continue to grow and thrive.

So what’s a cableco to do?

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

Last week I wrote a couple of blogs about DOCSIS technology and the traction HomePNA member CopperGate is getting promoting alternative HomePNA-based access technology to cablecos in China for IPTV delivery and Internet access in MDUs.

In the ten years since DOCSIS was invented there have been many technology advances. Fiber, for example, has gone from a core network transport technology to one that is becoming widely deployed worldwide to provide access to the premises and home. So … there you are in a huge consumer market served by a lot of mostly smaller cablecos that provide basic, often analog, cable service to their customers. These cablecos want to provide new triple-play services to their customers. Often there is no existing DOCSIS infrastructure -- in effect, it’s a green-field (an industry term for new construction) opportunity -- and the cablecos are free to select the optimum solution. But they don’t want to pay a lot for it. Hello HomePNA.

What makes HomePNA technology attractive for this market? First, HomePNA can share the coax cable with the cablecos’ TV channels allowing them to reuse the existing wires in the MDU. Second, it is low cost. Where DOCSIS requires a DOCSIS modem in each apartment, HomePNA-based implementations only need a low-cost Ethernet bridge in each apartment. Where DOCSIS requires a port on an expensive CMTS for each apartment, the HomePNA-based approach uses a low cost HomePNA master – essentially a HomePNA Ethernet bridge with different software – to provide connectivity to up to 32 or more apartments in the MDU. Where DOCSIS may require the cableco’s network cabling and equipment to be upgraded to support high speed bi-directional digital communication, the HomePNA approach uses a standard fiber connection instead.

The key to HomePNA technology’s appeal is its synchronous MAC architecture, discussed back in a June blog, which enables HomePNA’s best-in –class QoS (sorry MOCA PQoS) and master-client architecture. 

In a home network every device cocommunicates with every other connected device.  Not so in an MDU. In an MDU, communication is only between the service provider and each individual apartment -- every apartment communicates with the HomePNA master and the HomePNA master communicates to the service provider over the  FTTP connection.  To provide privacy, apartment to apartment communication is prevented by the HomePNA master even though all of the apartments are connected to the same coax cable. 

When a service provider provides triple play VoIP voice, IPTV, and Internet access services over a home network, guaranteed QoS enables interference-free voice and video in the presence of heavy Internet access action (I imagine that kids are downloading videos and songs at all hours of the day all over the world - legally of course).  Guaranteed QoS serves the same purpose in an MDU however it has another important function. HomePNA's guaranteed QoS mechanism also controls how much of the HomePNA capacity is allocated to each apartment -- guaranteeing the amount of bandwidth supplied to each apartment similar to the way a cableco might advertise a given megabits per second Internet access over DOCSIS.

These features and others make the combination of FTTP and HomePNA-based technologies a compelling solution for MDU apartment access.

Why DOCSIS isn't the first choice worldwide

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

The big HomePNA news this week (and I hope you read Monday’s blog so you know what I am talking about) was CopperGate’s announcement about the Shanghai Engineering Research Center for Broadband Technologies & Application (B-STAR) selecting HomePNA-based technology as its primary solution for its Multi Dwelling Unit (MDU) interactive Digital TV test program in Shanghai. Why didn’t they select DOCSIS like so many other cablecos? In a word, cost. HomePNA technology combined with fiber to the premises (FTTP) gave them the right mix of performance and features without the large price tag.

First, a little background on DOCSIS. The Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification or DOCSIS is an international standard developed by CableLabs, the cablecos’ R&D consortium. DOCSIS, like HomePNA, is an ITU standard although the work is done in Study Group 9 (SG 9) and is completely independent of the G.hn and HomePNA home networking standardization work being done in SG15.

DOCSIS defines the protocol for high-speed data transfer over an existing Cable TV system. The killer application, needless to say, is Internet access and there are a large number of DOCSIS cable modems sold worldwide (especially in North America). The first DOCSIS specification was released over 10 years ago. The most recent version, DOCSIS 3, adds support for IP – that is to say Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) - to the standard. Multiple versions of DOCSIS exist around the globe such as EuroDOCSIS to comply with differences in regional standards. CableLabs and other organizations perform DOCSIS equipment certification testing on a regular basis.

DOCSIS equipment consists of the cable modem installed in your home and a cable modem termination system (CMTS) located at the cableco’s “headend”. It’s not cheap for an MDU. A DOCSIS cable modem has to be installed in each apartment and connected to it’s corresponding port on the CMTS over the cableco’s coax/fiber (called HFC for hybrid fiber-coax) cabling. The CMTS connects the customer’s DOCSIS modem to the Internet.

For those of you who (like me) had early DOCSIS 1.0 modems that required a phone line connection in addition to the coax connection to operate, you've probably guessed this isn’t the entire story. When I first got broadband the only option was this DOCSIS kluge (kluge is an engineering term for a less than elegant system). I had to get a second dedicated phone line (remember phone lines? They are what DSL modems use today for Internet access, VoIP and IPTV) from the phone company in order for my cable modem to work. Cablecos had to upgrade their HFC network to provide a return path for upstream traffic – data sent from your PC to the Internet – over the coax. This also costs money. While many cableco’s HFC networks have been upgraded, there are parts of the world where the technology lags.

What's it all mean?  Stay tuned for the next post.

Where else in the world is HomePNA-based technology? China MDUs.

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

Anyone thats read our recent blog posts should know where HomePNA is – or at least about the continuing successes in North America. So that’s it, right? North American telcos select HomePNA, cablecos select MOCA (if they select anything at all), and the rest of the world goes with HomePlug or WiFi. Simple, clear, makes sense, and fortunately wrong.

For years editors and analysts have been asking me about other parts of the world and for years I have been pointing to wins at Sonaecom, KDDI and other telcos. With HomePNA member CopperGate’s recent announcement that The Shanghai Engineering Research Center for Broadband Technologies & Application (B-STAR) has selected HomePNA-based technology as its primary solution for its Multi Dwelling Unit (MDU) interactive Digital TV test program in Shanghai, however, the rules have changed significantly opening huge opportunities for HomePNA-based technology.

So what’s the big deal? Aside from the fact that it’s China, a relatively new market for HomePNA and a huge market opportunity estimated on the order of 100 million residences (CopperGate's release says B-Star alone expects to roll out to over 100,000 apartments initially and expand to 1 million residences by 2010), it’s a sale to cablecos. And it's access -- replacing the need for DOCSIS and similar technologies used in other parts of the world. 

 So what’s changed? Only our perceptions. More in a future post.

HomePNA Shown the Standard for TelcoTV

There is exciting news coming out of HomePNA member company CopperGate Communications, a leading provider of home networking chipsets for triple play IPTV over existing wiring. TELUS, a $9 billion Canadian national telecommunications provider, selected CopperGate’s HomePNA 3.1 technology integrated into set-top boxes and residential gateways manufactured by other HomePNA members for its TELUS TV service offering. TELUS TV is a 100 percent digital entertainment service that allows subscribers to customize their entertainment experience. With TELUS TV, customers get automatic access to TELUS Video On-Demand and can build a TV package from a list of more than 200 channels.

Now couple this news with recent findings that HomePNA was installed in more North American homes in the last quarter than any other coax home networking solution and we have even more to celebrate. “The addition of TELUS means that of the largest telcos in North America, 4 out of the top 5 that offer TelcoTV now support HomePNA 3.1 home networking technology,” noted Michael Wolf, Director of Digital Home research at ABI Research. “This win validates HomePNA as a home networking technology that is optimized for service provider rollouts to enable whole-home entertainment services such as TelcoTV.”

We believe that HomePNA has become the defacto standard for TelcoTV home networking. With industry deployments that go well beyond AT&T’s recently announced 650,000 paying U-verse subscribers, we see great growth ahead for HomePNA. What does this mean for the service providers? It means that if you’re not using HomePNA to distribute home entertainment over coax and phone you are missing out on a great market opportunity. So we encourage you to consider joining today and share in this amazing opportunity to grow right along with us! For information on membership, visit the HomePNA website.

The Value of HomePNA Certification

Why specify HomePNA certified products? Because nobody wants to get service calls from customers. HomePNA certification means that the product has passed a series of performance and interoperability tests that were developed to check that the products perform as specified in the HomePNA specification. Three or four times a year HomePNA hosts a “Plugfest” to bring together HomePNA members to test and certify their products. Only after products have passed this testing are they permitted to use the HomePNA certification mark. For the equipment manufacturer, certification increases the value of the HomePNA standard.

Our most recent Plugfest resulted in these products becoming certified:

2Wire iNID VDSL2 outdoor residential gateway and indoor Wi-Fi access point units

SMC VDSL residential Gateway and Ethernet to HomePNA 3.1 coax bridge

Scientific Atlanta IP set-top/DVR boxes

SendTek Ethernet to HomePNA 3.1 phone wire bridge and coax MII module

D-Link ADSL2+ residential gateway

CopperGate Communications 320 Mbps Ethernet to HomePNA 3.1 bridge reference design

For more information on HomePNA Plugfests go to the Web site.