HomePNA Blog

Who'sYour Help Desk ??

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

After blogging and evangelizing about telcos becoming the home owner’s PC help desk, it was nice to see a telco saying the same thing - and that thing reported in the Wall Street Journal (or the WSJ if you're really cool). Read on .... “More telecoms are offering tech-support services that extend beyond the phone line to the PC or TV. People want the same level of IT support they get in the workplace,” said Dan Alcazar, Embarq's consumer-marketing officer. "When you're at home, you don't have access to these kinds of things," he said. "It became apparent that there was a business opportunity there."

The July 31 issue of the WSJ article "Computer Glitch? Consider Calling the Phone Company” puts some meat on the bones by comparing the costs of services from AT&T, Verizon, Embarq, CenturyTel, Windstream, and Frontier Communications to Best Buy’s Geek Squad (hint, they’re cheaper). Although most telcos only offer support to broadband customers, some, such as Frontier, offer it to anyone. As someone that has personally experienced the thrill of being lobed back and forth like a birdie in a badminton game between Dell’s and Microsoft’s customer “support” desks, I say woo-hoo.

Of course the cost for providing this support will need to be driven down. According to the WSJ, Best Buy charges $300 for a house call. The telcos … a half to a third of that. Knowing as we do how much telcos hate house calls (a.k.a. truck rolls), you can guess where this is going. We expect to see even more emphasis on remote diagnostics and management and an increased drive in the Broadband Forum (formerly the DSL Forum) to complete the work of adding home network remote diagnostics to their Broadband Home suite of recommendations. We believe HomePNA has best-in-class capabilities and that this development is a win-win for industry and consumers alike.

What is Known about G.hn?

So what exactly is known about G.hn? It’s known that the anticipated future worldwide standard for wired home networking will work over coax, powerline and phone wires. The group has targeted 1 Gbit/s data rates over coax which should translate into 500Mbit/s or higher user throughput (what you get after subtracting the overhead). But that isn’t the whole story so read on.

Fast isn’t enough, it also has to be reliable and predictable over the entire house. That’s easier to do over communication media like coax and phone wires, not so easy over powerline. A lot of design and analysis effort is going into making G.hn robust. The more robust it is, the less the headaches later. To make this happen you need the kind of input that only comes from experience; which is why we are so excited about the participation of so many leading home networking technology companies.

Beyond speed and reach, it’s a given that G.hn will provide features such as guaranteed QoS (sometimes called parameterized QoS) that are as good or better than those provided by the current crop of existing-wire home networking technologies. HomePNA 3.1, for example, has featured guaranteed QoS since the HomePNA 3.0 spec was released in 2003 (both the HomePNA 3.0 and 3.1 are ITU standard G.9954. Other home networking technologies claim to support guaranteed QoS but since they are not all open standards it’s hard to verify this.

Other features such as hooks for remote management and diagnostics (see April 14 Blog “Got TR-069”) play a central role in service provider deployment and support plans so the ability to verify network performance – both during installation and remotely from the central office - are also a given.