HomePNA Blog

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.