HomePNA Blog

Quadruple-Play Ready

A new study released from Compete Inc., a Web analytics company, suggests consumers are ready for quadruple play services (voice, data, video and IPTV) and details telecom companies positioned best to take advantage of the emerging opportunities. It also reported that consumers are driven first by bundled pricing and convenience (no surprise there) and are less concerned about which services are in the bundle -- however they are more interested in bundling broadband access with phone and TV over cellular service somewhat offsetting the advantage of telcos with cellular offerings.  Marketing the offerings is critical. 

We don't find the information particularly revelatory as much as it confirms our observations of the rapidly growing market place where consumers seem to be eating up AT&T's U-Verse service. As we reported in several blogs, U-Verse subscriptions picked up at a dramatic pace in the last two quarters of 2008. While this building momentum may be moderated somewhat (in their last quarter results, AT&T announced that it will slow U-verse deployments slightly and plan to pass 30M homes in 2010 rather than 2009), deployments don't appear to be eclipsed by recent economic woes so we really don't expect to see any abysmal numbers reported in the near future. In fact, we are encouraging service providers to join HomePNA as soon as possible. By becoming a member you will be taking the first steps to dodge the economic bullet. The home networking market in general seems to be a good place to be "playing" if you want to set your sights on higher ground and survive the economic storm.

 

 

Just how mainstream is IPTV?

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

Once closet technology familiar among only geeks, gurus and techies IPTV has hit main street to become more commonly known among the "folks."  What evidence do we have to support our announcement? Just look at a recently launched video contest sponsored by Actiontec. Actiontec invited users to create a short video to show why they love their broadband connection. Videos can depict among others thing IPTV or connecting your home entertainment center to the Internet. Wait! Did they use the word IPTV undefined and business as usual in a consumer invitation? Yes, I believe they did. How exciting is that? And what does this mean for HomePNA technology that enables distribution of triple-play service including IPTV throughout the home? It means consumers are becoming aware of it and will not only ask for IPTV to be included in their service provider bundled packages but DEMAND it be included. Service providers not ahead of the demand will be forced to forge ahead to meet that demand by developing and delivering IPTV capabilities as a part of their standard offerings. We here at HomePNA welcome and encourage service providers in need of assistance to join our growing organizations and get a leg up on meeting the forthcoming demand.

IPTV the Next Entertainment Revolution … Think DVD

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

When DVDs first came out most users looked at the expensive discs and thought: needs a new and expensive DVD player, which I don't own (think Blue Ray today). Now DVD players and discs are as ubiquitous as VHS was about 10 years ago. Here at HomePNA we're excited because the next generation of home entertainment networking is right on the cusp of exploding onto the market and taking over like a really great leader coming to power. Industry statistics indicate a rapidly growing IPTV market that experts expect will take the home entertainment market by storm.

Fierce IPTV recently reported there will be 53 million IPTV subscribers worldwide in 2009 and reported total expected revenue of $38 billion from IPTV services next year.The report noted that the Asia-Pacific region will lead the world in subscriber growth, while China will be a particularly hot market. The research firm also reported consumer familiarity with IPTV is still low and cost continues to be the most significant factor in subscriber adoption. Elsewhere, ABI Research reported this year that there could be 93 million IPTV customers by 2013.

Fifty-three million IPTV subscribers represent a tremendous market opportunity. Technology companies working diligently to create IPTV-related products (think set-top boxes, gateways, etc.) will flourish is the evolving market. Companies that are still waiting to see or understand the value will soon miss the gravy train. Join HomePNA today and enjoy the rewards waiting for you in this rapidly growing marketplace. For more information, contact Rich Nesin, general manager, at rnesin@homepna.org.

ITU G.hn Delivers a Spec

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Have you noticed the press coverage that high performance home networking over existing wires is getting? It makes me nostalgic for the days when analysts dismissed us with a quick ‘the world is going wireless”. It probably is, but installations in millions of IPTV homes over the last couple years say that it isn’t always the best solution. Last week’s ITU announcement about completing the first G.hn standard seems to have gotten the most coverage yet (possibly due to how extraordinarily rare it is for a standards group to deliver a standard on time). So you may be wondering what actually happened and how?

If you have been following my ramblings about home networking standardization in the IEEE P1901; and ITU Q4/15 you may already have a good idea of what happened. If you’re not familiar with the ITU, standards can only be approved during special ITU “plenary” meetings. A plenary is a formal two week meeting of the entire SG 15 (not just the Q4/15 group that is part of SG 15 or the even smaller G.hn group that is part of Q4/15 and has been meeting every couple weeks for the last year to get the work done on time). Like the other meetings, the plenary was very technical with lots of informal working meetings during the evenings to refine the contributions and achieve consensus on the contributions (or in the words of one engineer, “lots of real work was done”). This is the “how”. This and a lot of hands-on direction from some of the world’s largest telcos.  Being the customer has its advantages and these customers see the advantages of a single open world-wide existing-wire home networking standard.

So what happened? I wrote a little about MACs and PHYs back in a June post about HomePNA's guaranteed QoS. Like most other home networking technologies, G.hn is built of two components; a MAC and a PHY. The MAC part, short for medium access control, manages the communication between devices on the home network. The PHY part, short for physical interface, encodes and decodes the data from the MAC – encoding it so that it can be carried efficiently over the media (which in the case of G.hn can be powerlines, phone wires or coax) and decoding the data that is received from the media so it can be processed by the MAC. Every product featuring a G.hn interface will have a MAC and PHY. So what is G.hn’s new G.9960 standard? It’s the new G.hn PHY. The companion G.hn MAC spec is scheduled to be completed in September.

More soon …

U-Verse Rocks and HomePNA Rolls!!

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, Marketing Director, HomePNA Alliance

We couldn't have bought better press than the article recently published in Screen Plays titled "AT&T U-verse Shows Strength with New Features, High Consumer Satisfaction." The article not only describes the numerous successes of AT&T's U-verse in the HD DVR market, citing the addition of 232,000 new U-verse subscribers added to the roster last quarter, but also acknowledges high customer satisfaction from those who have U-verse.

The report says, "The latest J.D. Power results, based on a survey of 18,938 residential TV service customers nationwide, rated U-verse first in all three regions where the service was factored into the survey, including the South, Southwest and North Central. The survey, conducted as U-verse approaches the one million subscriber mark, signaled the growing impact the IP-based service is having after a long launch period during which competitors suggested they saw little reason for concern."

The report goes on to cite the numerous benefits of U-Verse. Along with offering about 45 HD channels in most markets and the Total Home DVR service, U-verse now includes:

• Mobile Remote Access to DVR, which lets subscribers schedule and manage DVR recordings from any compatible mobile phone;
• AT&T Online Photos from Flickr, which lets customers browse photos they've uploaded to flickr.com and watch slide shows on U-verse TV;
• AT&T U-bar, which brings customizable weather, stock, sports and traffic information to the U-verse TV screen, without interrupting the current program;
• Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football, which allows customers to track the progress of fantasy teams, including current team matchups and league standings;
• YELLOWPAGES.COM TV, enabling searches to find local businesses and other information via the TV screen;
• AT&T Yahoo! Games, which brings online games – including Sudoku, Solitaire, JT's
• Blocks, Mah-jongg Tiles and Chess -- to the TV screen.

Since U-verse uses the HomePNA standard to distribute home entertainment over phone line and coax, we couldn't be happier about this news. As U-Verse deployment hits the one million mark, which all indicators show it will within months, our members can expect to enjoy similar success. We are quite certain the writing is on the wall for our competitors. HomePNA will ultimately become the number one choice for IPTV.

Don't miss out. We encourage all services providers, OEMs, and silicon providers to join now. The time is ripe! Take advantage of the obvious market growth.

Whole-home DVRs: AT&T U-verse Total Home DVR and Cablevision RS-DVR

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

Well the rumors we commented on last week about AT&T beginning the roll out of their whole-home DVR are true (we knew it all the time but were sworn to secrecy). True to our predictions and the power of IPTV, AT&T is introducing the U-verse Total Home DVR to customers in the Bay Area (at no additional charge) and plans to deploy to all U-verse TV customers by the end of 2008. That’s the power of AT&T’s model -- remote software upgrade combined with the advantage of an IP based system that uses a home-network such as HomePNA to send all kinds of video to the set-top boxes.

With the major telcos offering whole-home DVR, the MSOs can’t be far behind, right? Lightreading reported today that Cablevision announced plans to offer their version of a whole-home DVR early next year. The twist? Instead of having a hard drive in the home and using an IP based home network to deliver the data from one set-top in the home to another, the Cablevision RS-DVR stores the video on a remote server (the “RS” in “RS-DVR” stands for remote server -- a super PC with a big hard drive located somewhere in their network outside the customer's home) and sends it down the cable to any set-top in the home like video on demand. It’s an effective solution for MSOs, using a lot of their existing technology, but not a practical solution for telcos. More on this in a future post.

G.hn – Why So Fast?

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

Five years ago, a long time in the world of high tech, we introduced HomePNA 3.0 (a.k.a., HPNA) to equipment vendors. Most thought it was great stuff but couldn’t conceive of applications that needed so much speed and guaranteed QoS. They told us to market it to the service providers, which we did. Then along came IPTV triple play, HDTV and GPON and suddenly nobody was wondering what to do with all that speed.

Fast forward to today and even HomePNA 3.1’s 320 Mbit/sec data rate, providing up to 230 Mbit/sec of user throughput (the real capacity after the overhead is subtracted), doesn’t seem so fast. All right, it does seem really fast. But some, like Verizon’s CTO Mark Wegleitner who is calling for at least 100 Mbps of actual user throughput today and 400 Mbps in less than two years, want more. Why so?

Why has several answers. First is that sales of HDTVs are going up – but it’s not that simple. Digital video is compressed and the type of compression used (MPEG 2, MPEG 4, VC-1, etc.) has a big impact on the amount of network bandwidth – another word for the network capacity - used. Add to that display of multiple IPTV streams on each TV and it becomes more about the number and type of streams family members view than about the number of TVs.

Don’t forget the video streams that originate within the home. With the coming proliferation of IP-enabled whole-home DVRs, every IPTV will have a DVR further increasing the number of streams being recorded and viewed. But there’s another gotcha coming. Fast-forward on the DVR often uses “trick mode”, a technique that can increase the amount of bandwidth used by that stream by three or four times.

And don’t forget Internet access. The home network shouldn’t slow down Internet access. With fiber to the home (FTTH) providing 100 Mb/sec and more, the data part of triple-play service can consume a significant chunk of the home network capacity all by itself. It’s no wonder so much effort is going into speeding G.hn to market.