HomePNA Blog

Clouds Gathering Over Your Home

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

We always find it interesting when new terms get coined in the tech industry to add to the ever-growing Alphabit soup of acronyms and random phrases. We recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about “cloud computing,” which could also be considered “grid computing” that really means the network is the computer. With the slow merge of the Internet with all things home entertainment, we’re willing to buy into the idea that clouds are gathering over your home network. As the home network comes together with the Internet to provide everything from basic computing needs to robust home entertainment and IPTV, the idea that the network drives everything in the home doesn’t seem like a stretch. Between HomePNA and wireless LAN you can attach to virtually any relevant device in the home without new wires. We’re willing to be that with the approval G.hn, the type of consumers’ in-home wiring will be of even less consequence to service providers that adopt the new standard. 

QoS part 2: What is Priority QoS

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

In the June 4th post QoS part 1 we jumped into the middle of a discussion on Quality of Service (QoS). If you recall, QoS is a mechanism used to provide reliable and predictable delivery of real-time data such as IPTV and VoIP streams over a home network that is carrying other “best-effort” data like porn (you are enabling those parental controls, right?). To techies, home network Quality of Service (QoS) used to means priority-based QoS, the original QoS provided by Wi-Fi home networks.

So where does the “priority” in Priority QoS come from? It comes from the IEEE

Data sent over a network is broken into same-size pieces called “packets,” which are like the way the words in a book are broken into pages. Information is attached to each packet to tell the network equipment things like the size of the packet, where the packet comes from, and where it’s going – this is called the packet “header.”

Header information helps network equipment to route the packet from its source, say a server at You Tube, to its destination, say your PC. Included in this header are three “priority bits.” (You’ve probably guessed where this is going, right?) Three priority bits enable eight levels of priority although sometimes only four are used. Real-time data such as video is usually given a high priority and non-real-time “best-effort data” is given low priority. Network equipment uses various techniques to insure the delivery of high-priority data over low priority. Priority QoS, also called Class of Service (CoS), will prioritize one type of data over another but typically won’t help when two same-priority data streams are being sent simultaneously.