Fun Times and Success Continues in IEEE 1901 Land....

Last week in Tel Aviv, IEEE 1901 accomplished an unprecedented feat. The accomplishment could be explained by nothing else but phenomenal, possible, because of the positive contributions and team spirit within the IEEE 1901 group.

IEEE 1901 had more than 3000 comments to be resolved in 4 months.
Many naysayers went in public and said it can’t be achieved. Some even gave the examples of other standards forum and mentioned that it would take alteast 3 years to resolve all those comments.

Well, the IEEE 901 group accepted it as a challenge and resolved all those comments in an unprecedented time period- 4 months.

Yes, the members worked hard, yes there were more than 20 hour calls a week, yes, there were some times, when we had to skip dinners and lunch, but we accomplished it all.

In Tel Aviv, the IEEE 1901 group also agreed with super-majority that all the comments were resolved to the satisfaction of the group.

This paves the path for final spec publication by middle of next year.

This goes again in the face of naysayers or people with other interests who have continuously tried to bring down the IEEE 1901 efforts. IEEE 1901 group has always emerged strongly and proved them wrong at every step.

Forgotten is the fact that IEEE 1901 in a year’s time frame has achieved that no other standards have been able to accomplish

In December of last year, IEEE 1901 baseline was confirmed and since then many positive things have been accomplished by the IEEE 1901 group
Letter Ballot
Support of Smart Grid Applications
Support of Lower Data rates Applications
Support of Transportation activities
Resolution of more than 3000 comments
Streamlining of specifications – removal of part that remained immature tied to other standards group.

The group decided in Tel Aviv to publish and allow sale of the IEEE 1901 Draft Specification V2.0 from IEEE website. The Draft Standard should be available for sale from January of next year. This is a very strong endorsement of the quality, robustness and maturity of the IEEE 1901 draft specifications.

As Aristotle has said:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.

Well, for IEEE 1901 group it has become a habit to repeatedly deliver on excellence.

Thanks
P. Raj

Service Providers are continuing to voice support of Homeplug technology as the long term solution for powerline home networking.

According to Carol Wilson of Light Reading, "G.hn, the home networking standard whose physical architecture was adopted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) earlier this month, is not getting rave reviews from some broadband service providers because of concern that the standard lacks backward compatibility with existing home network technologies, particularly HomePlugAV, the powerline home network".

The solution is simple. A planned Amendment to the G.hn PHY is currently under discussion in ITU. That Amendment must ensure compatibility with HomeplugAV.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=183799&f_src=lightreading_gnews

Third Knock in Roughly Three Weeks for G.hn

There is a great article in SmartGridToday publication asking the question:
"Could MoCA/HomePlug win in-home networking wars?"

The author cites three significant events in last three weeks that have created positive impact to the home networking space in general.

1) Participants in smart grid Interoperability Standards questioned the viability of Ghn, though NIST included it in the draft roadmap.

Truth of the matter is G.hn, does not have MAC specifications. They have only approved PHY specification, for which there is already an amendment. An amendment to a specification is a document that addresses the missing elements, additional features for the particular specification. G.9960(PHY document) that got approved last month, already has an amendment in works. This reflects the maturity and the completeness of the document.
Currently, apart from PHY specifications* (amendment- not yet published), G.hn has nothing to offer the industry.


2) IEEE P1901 200 Mbps PLC interoperability standard dropped the placeholder for third PHY layer meant to support G.hn


The group gave an opportunity to G.hn group to provide access extensions for PHY/MAC for 9 months. In those nine moths, there were no contributions provided that would address the access extensions for G.hn. This reflected again the maturity of the G.hn specifications. Finally, to streamline the specifications, IEEE 1901 group overwhelmingly decided to remove G.hn compatible PHY from the specifications.

3) Entropic will partner with Intellon to boost the availability of home networking solutions combining coaxial cable and powerline Communications.

According to Smart Grid, Entropic's work with Intellon amounts to the third knock in roughly three weeks for G.hn.
Unlike G.hn solution, the joint work will develop solution that will be backwards compatible with tens of million chipsets deployed in the market.

Thanks
P. Raj

Well, fun times in IEEE 1901 land....

As I mentioned in my previous blog, that IEEE 1901 is making siginificant strides towards completion of the specification and an important step towards it was the approval of the letter ballot in July. Since then the group has dedicated its time to resolving the comments.

As per the last weeks' IEEE 1901 Boston meeting, we have resolved more than 50% of the comments. Unlike other standards group(where the editor decides himself as to the resolution is consulted before the comments are disposed.

Also, last week, the IEEE 1901 group unanimously agreed to include Smart Energy and Transportation Platform in the PAR.

During the meeting in Boston, the working group also decided to stop the development of the ITU-T G.hn Compatible PHY/MAC Draft option. Related chapters and annexes were removed from the Draft, becausse of the immaturity of the G.hn specifications.

Looking at the group composition one can really appreciate the diversity of IEEE 1901 membership ranging from utilities, service providers, OEMs, ODMs, technology integrators, CE manufacturers, silicon manufacturers etc. The groups' membership has been increasing steadily over the course of time.

Things are moving forward in a positive way and we expect the specfications to be ready soon.

Thanks
P Raj

In the arena of home networking research and analysis, Parks Associates are the acknowledged leaders, and Kurt Scherf is the doyen. When Kurt speaks, you listen. Recently, Kurt has been discussing wireline technologies with service providers and his conclusions are very interesting.

Concerns about ITU G.hn’s failure to build in compatibility with the dominant existing technologies on powerline and coax, Homeplug and MOCA respectively are now clearly being voiced.

According to an article published in the standard, 15 October 2009, recent conversations with European service providers have convinced Kurt that HomePlug has strong backing from that industry, which is the most important channel for wired home network gear today. "I do not think that the G.hn effort will fully succeed until they take into account HomePlug and build in some compatibility with it," Scherf said.

The article can be found here http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/10/15/g-hn-home-network-standard-progresses

Title: Avoiding PLC Market Fragmentation – Part 1

There has been buzz about the G.hn technology recently. Players who do not have any powerline market presence or the ones that has failed miserably to establish themselves in the PLC Market have created the buzz. They want to create a specification that is incompatible with the existing technologies--- resetting the market, creating fragmentation and falsely believing that this gives them a competitive advantage.

In this blog, I will provide few points as to how G.hn affects the powerline market space:

1) G.hn risks fragmenting rather than unifying the wireline market
ITU-T is a well-respected international Standard Development Organization (SDO) for the telecommunication industry and has played an essential role in creating standards for that industry, but ITU-T has no history of creating successful specifications for applications outside of telecommunications applications. A successful wireline home-networking standard must have broad market support from all industry sectors, including consumer electronics, cable and satellite service providers, computer electronics and, with the rapidly increasing interest in powerline communications applications in smart grid and electric vehicle applications, the utility and automotive industries. Most of these industries have a long history of supporting standards promulgated by the IEEE. If G.hn is unable to produce a standard that is interoperable with the recently approved draft IEEE 1901 standard, it will likely fail to gain market acceptance or worse, create a standards and market battle between G.hn and 1901, which could last for years, potentially slowing market deployment for all wireline networking technologies while customers, service providers in particular, wait to see which standard the market chooses, or select another technologies such as wireless.

2) G.hn integrated circuits (ICs) are at least 2-3 years from being market ready
Developing ICs to a new standard takes a great deal of time – silicon design and production qualification, firmware development, compliance and interoperability testing, reference designs and customer support, etc. This typically takes 3~5 years for a completely new specification, particularly for one of the complexity of G.hn plus several years to develop test plans, correct specification ambiguities and errors, and reach multivendor interoperability. Thus HomePlug IC suppliers have an additional 3 years to mature their product lines and develop the market before the first market ready G.hn ICs are available. This head start enjoyed by HomePlug and IEEE 1901 may be difficult to overcome unless G.hn is interoperable with HomePlug AV.

3) HomePlug AV is a de facto powerline standard
HomePlug is enjoying significant success in the market with over 40 million ICs shipped and in use by approximately 50 service providers representing over 70% of total powerline networking sales today. There are already two silicon vendors shipping HomePlug AV IC’s today (Intellon and Gigle) with four additional silicon provides with announcements for HomePlug AV ICs in 2009 (Arkados, CopperGate, SPiDCOM, ST Micro) HomePlug has an established Compliance and Interoperability test and certification program for HomePlug AV that is already successfully assuring interoperability among vendors. A key goal of any standards organization is to create standards that enable multiple silicon vendors to deliver interoperable solutions that offer multiple product choices for service providers and other customers, and drive competition over price and technology innovation. This goal is being achieved with HomePlug AV for the powerline home networking market. It is also important to note that except for ISP (Inter-System Protocol) and a few optional features, the IEEE 1901 FFT PHY and MAC are identical to HomePlug AV. Thus, HomePlug’s compliance process for HomePlug AV will be extended for IEEE 1901.

In my next blog article, I will post some additional points regarding how to avoid the fragmentation of PLC market.

Post by
P Raj

Depth of HomePlug Technology

HomePlug technology has coalesced all right elements for success. It has multiple silicon manufacturers, wide industry support in terms of OEM, Service providers, ODM and Retail.

Below is the snippet of the HomePlug technology users/ developers/ proponents

1) Silicon Manufacturers:

· Currently Available :
a. Intellon Corporation
b. Gigle Semiconductor


· Planned Releases
c. Arkados
d. Coppergate
e. SPiDCOM
f. ST Micro

2) OEM Support
a. More than 45 OEMs support and use the HomePlug Technology

3) ODM Support
a. More than 30 ODMS support and use the HomePlug Technology

4) Service Providers
a. More than 50 Service providers deploy HomePlug Technology

5) Retail
a. North America
i. More than 15 retail suppliers support and sell HomePlug Technology in North America

b. Europe
i. More than 20 retail suppliers support and sell HomePlug Technology in Europe

c. Asia
i. More than 10 retails suppliers support and sell HomePlug Technology in Asia

The above numbers clearly goes on demonstrate the support HomePlug Technology enjoys with different players in the value chain. It also demonstrates the success HomePlug technology proponents and its players are enjoying in the market space. With the above depth it would not be an exaggeration to state that HomePlug Technology is the ONLY home networking technology that is positioned for long term success.

Posted By
P.Raj

HomePlug Technology Rocks!!!

NIST, mandated by Congress in the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 to coordinate the development of a framework of protocols and model standards to achieve interoperability of the Smart Grid published the initial set of standards and specifications for inclusion in Release 1.0 of the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework in May 2009.

The set of 16 NIST-recognized interoperability standards — ranging from smart customer meters to distributed power generation components to cyber security — included HomePlug technology.

The second release of the Interoperability Roadmap published in June 2009, explicitly lists HomePlug AV (HPAV), HomePlug Green PHY (HPGP) and IEEE 1901 as the NIST approved technologies.

Thus, HPAV/HPGP/P1901 are the only broadband PLC technologies included in the Interim Roadmap.

A broad range of stakeholders were engaged in the development of this Interim Roadmap. Over 1000 stakeholders participated in workshops to achieve consensus on the critical standards and standards development activities needed for the Smart grid.

Inclusion of HPAV, HPGP and IEEE 1901( interoperable with HPAV) in the smart energy roadmap goes onto prove the superiority and the market confidence HomePlug Technology enjoys.

A set of standards for the devices that connect the grid is critical to the progress of the smart grid, and to meet President Obama’s plan for a smart electrical grid to lower energy costs for consumers and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to the U.S. commerce secretary Gary Locke and U.S. energy secretary Steven Chu. These standards will allow users to connect directly with their power suppliers using real-time, two-way communications technologies.

Importance of Interoperability

In my last blog, I talked about the IEEE 1901 Draft Standard that was approved in Tokyo and its interoperability with HPAV. In this blog, I would like to demonstrate with use case, the real significance of Interoperability for all the stakeholders.

Use Cases:

a. Pierre lives in an apartment in Paris, France. Most of his neighbors, including Jean who is Pierre’s best friend, already have HomePlug adaptors; HomePlug embedded STBs for IPTV delivery applications and video distribution. Pierre buys a non-HomePlug/non-IEEE 1901 solution along with his Plasma TV set for IPTV applications. He tries to connect the adaptors in his apartment. Since the adaptors he bought were not HomePlug/IEEE 1901 interoperable, he started having problems receiving clear picture on his TV set, because of interference. The picture is grainy and the sound quality is horrible. He tries fiddling with his TV set and changing the connection outlets but with no success. He concludes that the problem is with the TV set and he returns the TV set back to the store. This is a significant loss for the store from which he bought and to the brand of the TV, he purchased, as studies have showed that if the first experience is bad with a particular brand or the store the user refrains from buying the same brand or from the store in the future.

The above use case demonstrates the importance of interoperability for the user as well as the players in the value chain (TV manufacturers, Electronic Stores). Having an interoperable solution would prevent the above scenario. IEEE 1901 interoperable/HomePlug AV interoperable solution would yield in the best experience for Pierre as well as the value chain players. Another interesting fact to realize is HomePlug is an already established technology and thus introducing a non-interoperable solution would cause tremendous problems to the non-interoperable solution.


b. Jean, who is Pierre’s best friend, has IPTV service from “PT”. “PT” is the largest seller of HomePlug Devices and the biggest HomePlug proponent in France because of the ease of installation and the near zero return rate for HomePlug devices. When Pierre plugs in his non-HomePlug/non-IEEE interoperable solution in the socket, it causes interference in Jean’s network. Unaware of what Pierre was doing, Jean calls PT complaining about the problem. Jean mentions that he has been using the PT service for more than 5 years and he has never experienced any problem before. PT checks the network from its side and everything looks clear to them, except for added interference. Not knowing where the added interference is coming from PT sends the technicians to check for it. By that time, Pierre was frustrated and he had removed his non-P1901/non-IEEE interoperable solution out of the outlets. Thus, the line had become clear and the technicians could not find the problem. Jean had good service now. Pierre’s effort to use non-HPAV/ non-IEEE 1901 interoperable solution caused PT to send their technicians to the field handle the phone calls, address the customer’s woes- all resulting in added expenses for PT.

The above use case demonstrates the importance of interoperability for the existing customers and his service provider. The above use case is realistic as it would be hard to control users buying the adaptors from the retail market. This would cost significant amount of time and money for the Service Providers, grievance to the customers for no obvious fault of theirs. This will result in very bad reputation for the non-HPAV/non-IEEE 1901 interoperable solution.

HomePlug currently has sold more than 35 million chipsets and is on course to selling more than 200 million chipsets by 2013 [Source: iSuppli Wired Communications Q4’08 Topical Report].
If a non-HPAV / non-IEEE 1901 interoperable solution enters the market it not only results in degraded performance but also causes interference to the deployed HomePlug chipsets.

Thus, “interoperability” is not a “good-to-have” requirement, but a “MUST” requirement for success of power line technologies and for that matter the home networking technologies. IEEE 1901 has realized this market reality.

Posted by P. Raj

IEEE 1901 Momentum Update

IEEE 1901 is continuing to capture the minds by making good progress. The standard development process is moving forward at a brisk pace given the complexity of the technology. I was at the IEEE 1901 meeting in Tokyo last week and the work was focused on getting the specifications delivered for letter ballot (IEEE 1901 Draft Standard). I was very pleased to see the amount of co-operation among major contributors in the group. The work was a concerted effort by most of the industry players.

If you are not following IEEE P1901’s history, it delivered on its promise to send the baseline text for letter ballot (IEEE 1901 Draft Standard) by July.
This implies that the specifications were stable and mature enough for designers to start their design. This is a significant milestone in IEEE standards development process.

In order to be compliant with the new standard HomePlug chipsets need to add only ISP/IPP element, HomePlug AV devices are already interoperable with future IEEE 1901 devices. The PHY/MAC of the IEEE 1901 standard is already implemented in silicon and field tested. The document defines ALL the details of MAC and PHY and for the parties interested in understanding the details, I can say that the agreed upon standard has more than 1500 pages that provides all the intricacies and the details for implementation.

The striking feature of the approval process was that the letter ballot was approved with more than 82% of the votes. The prospects look good for sponsor ballot in December 2009 and the standards publications in 1H2010.

Posted by P Raj

HomePlug AV – The Only High-speed Power line Technology with multiple silicon providers

It is expected that HomePlug AV technology will have 6 silicon providers by the end of the 2009. It’s the only 200Mbps powerline technology with multiple silicon providers.

Here are links to announcements from all the companies:

Intellon: http://www.intellon.com/company/press/pressrelease.php?ReleaseID=208

Gigle: http://www.gigle.biz/images/Press_Homeplug_Certification.pdf

Arkados: http://arkados.com/Press-Releases/2008-10-30-STMicro-Arkados-Agreement.pdf

CopperGate: http://copper-gate.com/solutions/homeplug_av/

SPiDCOM: http://www.spidcom.com/cms/site/PDF/Press-Releases/20090223_SPC300-HomePlugAV-SoC_PR.pdf

STMicroelectronics: http://www.st.com/stonline/stappl/cms/press/news/year2008/t2339.htm

Having multiple silicon providers cements HomePlug’s position as the defacto powerline standards and provides its customers with competitive costs and complementary and diverse features.

Plus, the solution provided by Gigle has already been HomePlug certified and is interoperable with the existing deployed base.

Posted by P Raj