HomePlug Shines at CES 2010

Walking into the exhibit halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center, no one could miss the HomePlug TechZone at CES 2010. At over 20-feet tall and barely squeezing into one thousand square feet of floor space, it dominated the portal to the South Hall and was chock full of new HomePlug-certified products from more companies than you can shake an extension cord at.

Sponsored by six HomePlug product companies Asoka, GigaFast, Plaster Networks, Russound, Tatung, and six HomePlug semiconductor providers Arkados, Atheros, Coppergate (a Sigma Designs Company), Gigle Networks, SPiDCOM, and STMicroelectronics, the TechZone demonstrations included HDTV distribution, whole-house audio systems, WiFi extensions, videogame connectivity, surveillance, in-home displays, smart meters and smart grid solutions – even some that combined Zigbee and HomePlug Smart Energy technologies (courtesy of JetLun).



The clear market leader in powerline communications (as of January, over 40 million HomePlug products have been sold), products containing HomePlug technology from brand names such as Aztech, Belkin, Checkolite, devolo AG, Linksys by Cisco, Monster Cable, NetGear, Sling Media, Solwise, and Zyxel filled six tall display cases that framed the pavilion.

Besides a giant display, the HomePlug alliance also made some giant announcements:

• The IEEE 1901 Draft Standard for Powerline Communications was published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (the same folks who brought you the wireless 802.11 standards). Historically, IEEE’s open standards dramatically boost the adoption rate of new technologies.
• HomePlug’s new liaison agreement with the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) paves the way to help service providers feel comfortable that reliable high-speed wired connectivity is available via any wire in the home.
• Continuing with theSmart Energy focus, the HomePlug alliance announced that the HomePlug GP (“Green PHY”) Specification for Smart Grid Applications will be available for implementation in 1Q/2010. Fully interoperable with both HomePlug AV and HomePlug AV2 products, the HomePlug alliance expects to begin certifying chips and products in early 2011.

The alliance and its members expect to release more news at 2010 progresses. Watch this space and homeplug.org for updates.

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