Transcript
The HomeGrid Forum has reprinted this with permission from Rider Research.
May 11-17, 2012
HomeGrid Aims at Telcos & Powerline Markets - Testing Now, Products by Year-End - Will Develop a P1905 ‘Annex’ for Including Wi-Fi After a quiet period, the coming HomeGrid (G.hn) home networking standard is emerging from its development period to one of testing and ultimately to deployment, according to John Egan, manager of strategic marketing and standards at Marvell, which plans to make HomeGrid chips and to HomeGrid Forum president and Intel employee Matthew Theall. Both reported positively about the HomeGrid Forum hosted event HomeGrid plugfest that Telefónica sponsored in Brazil in Q4 2011. Participating were four potential HomeGrid chipmakers: Marvell, Lantiq, Sigma Designs and Taiwan-based Metanoia Communications. Metanoia is a good fit because it makes chips that are used in equipment for telcos, mostly in Asia, such as VDSL2, GPON and ADSL2+ chips. Chipmakers Xingtera, Kawasaki and TangoTec are members of the HomeGrid Forum but have not yet publicly announced chips and did not participate in the Plug Fest. Xingtera’s focuses on home networking and smart grid markets. Telefónica brought companies that are part of its supply chain to get educated on the benefits of G.hn. It’s noteworthy that Telefónica, the world’s third largest telco, has invested in and made a verbal commitment (something about an important part of its future) to Quantenna, maker of carrier-grade Wi-Fi video chips. The UK test house Trac Global sanctioned the plugfest. HomeGrid’s Another plugfest was held in Taiwan, sponsored and funded by the Taiwanese government funded Institute for Information Industry (III). The test house Allion was a co-sponsor and provided equipment for the plugfest although it is not yet a sanctioned HomeGrid test house. Telco gear maker Motorola Mobility, soon to be owned by Android king Google, has recently joined the HomeGrid Forum. So has Minnesotabased HomePNA gear maker Suttle, which also makes MoCA and fiber optic-based equipment. You can see where G.hn is going by where it’s been. - Major European-based telco sponsors plugfest in Brazil. - Taiwan technology agency finances plugfest for companies with an Asian bent. - AT&T executive Vernon Reed writes glowing blogs about testing
Issue 781 HomeGrid network in his home. See The Online Reporter 762 dated December 15, 2011. HomeGrid’s initial target markets are telcos in the US, Europe and Asia, many of which had a go at HomePlug (European telcos) and HPNA (AT&T and smaller US and Canadian telcos). For the most part, AT&T being the most notable exception, coax is not widely deployed in their footprint. If you assume that every telco is offering a pay TV service and most every pay TV subscriber will want a whole home DVR, it’s a very big market. Marvell’s Egan said Asia is its major target market because of its newness to home networking and its sheer size. China, he said, has 365 cities with more than 1 million people — more cities than Egan’s home state Massachusetts. Noticeably missing is the entire MoCA crowd — the cablecos, satcos and one lone telco, Verizon, which bet on MoCA’s home networking even before the cablecos did. Egan and Theall said the Taiwanese plugfest is likely to be the last one before finalizing the certification test plans.
Time Line
Shipping Schedules Samples of HomeGrid chips are already being sent to STB makers to help them design and assemble boxes for telcos to test. We could not find out which companies are shipping or which telcos are testing, however. We suspect that AT&T, BT and Telefónica are already testing HomeGrid gear because they are on the HomeGrid board and have been pushing it towards standardization. Chip and box makers don’t like to divulge their
ship dates but the indications are that: - End of Q2: Quantity shipments of HomeGrid-certified chips. - End of Q3: HomeGrid equipment will start being certified and allowed to use the HomeGrid logo. - End of Q4: HomeGrid gear will start shipping. The P1905 Matter The MoCA and HomePlug crowd are developing a technology called P1905 that is intended to bridge HomePlug, MoCA, Ethernet and (most importantly) Wi-Fi, to make it easier for consumers to install networks that use two or more home network technologies — continued on page two
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HomeGrid: continued from page ONE
as, for example, MoCA over coax or HomePlug over the power lines to a room and then Wi-Fi within the room. We asked Egan about developing a version of P1905 for HomeGrid so that it could have a similar bridge. He said that the HomeGrid chipmakers have agreed to develop a P1905 annex once the P1905 members have determined a standard. They expect to start development in Q3 2012 and finish by year-end. He said the effort will be no more than the equivalent of one person working for three months. It is easier to do P1905 for HomeGrid, he said, because its API is the same for coax, powerline and telephone wires, which will reduce the complexity. Having a common API for all of a home’s wires, he said, reduces the chance of making mistakes in coding, which will delight the telcos. HomeGrid’s appeal, he said, goes beyond that because HomeGrid was first an industry standard and then a technology. That’s unlike HomePlug and MoCA, which were first a technology (Intellon, now Qualcomm, Atheros and Entropic respectively) and then a standard. HomeGrid’s multi-vendor and standards-based development will drive increased innovation and reduced cost, he said. It’s the same network technology for all wires: coax, powerline, telephone and fiber.
May 11-17, 2012
The Wi-Fi 11ac Matter Asked about the threat that the video-grade 11ac version of Wi-Fi might pose to the HomeGrid standard, Egan said that Marvell has developed 11ac technology that it will offer. See The Online Reporter 772 March 915, 2012. However, the telcos, he said, are talking about a wireline backbone that reaches to the rooms with TV sets and Wi-Fi for within those rooms and to other rooms not connected to the wireline backbone. That’s all the more reason, of course, to have a P1905 bridging technology. HDTVs, and especially quad TVs (4Kx2K super HD videos that will require about 20 Mbps per channel), will need wireline’s flicker-free and piracy-proof capabilities, he and others have said. A major barrier for any form of Wi-Fi, he said, is the concrete walls that are prevalent in Europe. The problem is compounded, he said, in humid areas (such as India) where the walls absorb large quantities of the water in the air. Egan and other HomeGrid partisans say that HomeGrid really shows its stuff when compared to HomePlug. They see the portion of the market that MoCA has not filled and which HomePlug has not sold well in as prime selling territory for HomeGrid. Most of the world’s telcos, he said, have not yet standardized on and started deploying any home network standard. They can easily and inexpensively begin deploying HomeGrid equipment.
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