HomePlug Powerline Alliance

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