HomePNA Blog

IEEE P1901 Has a Draft Standard

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Well the IEEE P1901 Working Group certainly got its act together. Last week they approved the first IEEE P1901 Draft Standard with more than an 82% majority -- which represents some great consensus building.

This doesn’t mean that all the work is done but it certainly is a big step in the right direction. According to Wikipedia, some P1901 watchers attribute this to inclusion of the ITU G.hn MAC as one of the supported MACs (yes, one of them -- P1901 still carries a lot of baggage) but it’s not clear to me whether that’s a done deal or not. I heard there is still some work to be done on the MACs and of course the draft standard has to go through the IEEE’s letter ballot/comment period/resolution process to resolve any open issues. Comments are resolved at P1901 meetings and the next opportunity will be the Boston meeting at the end of October).

Standardization is good for the industry. That’s why HomePNA decided to standardize its technology under the ITU years ago. It levels the playing field and insures that the technology is available to everyone. The market will decide the winners.

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.

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 …

Powerline Home Networking Update - The IEEE P1901 Work Creeps On

By Rich Nesin, General Manager, HomePNA

Last summer I attended an IEEE P1901 standards meeting - the group standardizing home networking and broadband access over powerlines - and was inspired to post a couple blogs about the experience.

Well, half a year has passed and if you haven’t been following the play by play action you haven’t missed much.  If you recall, the current P1901 “compromise” proposals (there are 3) came about after HomePlug and HD-PLC supporters broke the three-way deadlock by combining their proposals at the expense of UPA. The new proposal, constructed by gluing together large chunks of HomePlug AV and HD-PLC along with some new “coexistence” circuitry, will allow them to coexist with HD-PLC and HomePlug AV as well as with other existing powerline home networking technologies (or at least the existing technologies that implement the new coexistence mechanism). It will coexist with some technologies – and you can guess which ones -- better than with others.  At least it will if they can ever get past the proposal stage and start working on the actual draft standard.

Anyway, six months later and the drama continues.  The joint proposal was voted down at the Madrid meeting which, in theory, should've sent everyone back to their drawing boards to draft a new proposal.  That’s the theory.  In fact what happened was that the same compromise proposal is being voted on again.

Now, and this is hearsay (but juicy hearsay), the rumor is that a certain party has been very active adding voting supporters to P1901. Some of these supporters, the rumor goes, have little to do with home networking or access over powerlines.  As we discussed in the past, a new member must attend a couple of P1901 meetings to vote on a proposal so this is where the rumor gets juicier.  The proposal supporters have asked for a telephone conference on December 9th, before the next face to face meeting in Japan on December 16th, to review the “no” comments made subsequent to the last meeting in San Francisco.  Speculation is that they have requested that this teleconference be considered a working group meeting so that it counts toward the new members’ voting qualification. 

Wouldn’t it be better if we all just tried to get along? 

What the Big Dig and Chunnel can teach us about IEEE P1901 and ITU G.hn

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

As can probably guess we spend a lot of time discussing P1901 and G.hn. My colleague Michael Weissman, a source of really good marketing anecdotes, has a favorite one about the time he heard marketing guru Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, speak at conference. The talk compared two major construction projects, Boston’s “Big Dig” and the “Chunnel” under the English Channel.

The story goes that the Chunnel took about 7 years to complete, is about 30 miles long, and cost around $15B in today’s dollars or $500M/mile. The Big Dig took about 15 years to complete, spans 3.5 miles (about half in tunnels), and cost around $15B in today’s dollars or about $4.3B/mile. As Christensen tells it, the moral of the story is that infrastructure made the difference. The Big Dig had to replace and connect to a very complex and heavily traveled transportation infrastructure. The Chunnel was green field – nothing existed previously so it was all new construction.

A great anecdote but what does it have to do with P1901 or G.hn? When G.hn began it was understood and agreed that no attempt would be made to make it interoperable with existing standards. This was painful for HomePNA members since we have always successfully standardized our technology under the ITU but we agreed for the greater good. G.hn is a green field standard, free to select the best and newest technology available. IEEE P1901 started with several existing standards (the infrastructure) and has evolved into an awkward multi-MAC, multi-PHY architecture with several implementation options. The result is slow progress and the probability that a consumer will buy two IEEE P1901 devices that won’t be any faster than today’s products or work together. We’re not sure that is progress.