- One Small Step with HomePlug, One Giant Step Toward G.hn
Chipmaker CopperGate this week announced its first HomePlug chipset for home networking. The company is the primary producer of chips for HomePNA, which AT&T uses in its U-verse home networks. Smaller telcos in Asia, the Americas and Europe also use HomePNA set-top and network gear, mainly over coax.
Michael Weissman, VP of North American marketing, said consumers and pay-TV services want to use existing wires to network a home. CopperGate, he said, can deliver digital broadcast content over every wire inside the home – coax, phone lines and now with the HomePlug AV CG2110 – electrical wiring in the home.
The chipset will be aggressively priced, he said
The company expects to announce two major vendors as customers as soon as chip testing is successfully completed.
The CopperGate HomePlug AV CG2110 chipset provides up to a 200 Mbps physical layer (PHY) bit rate, and up to 110 Mbps effective throughput. It’s optimized to stream high- and standard-definition TV (HDTV and SDTV), VoIP and other applications that are highly time-sensitive and require low latency.
Coppergate also added its TR69 technology, an industry standard that allows service providers to remotely diagnose network gear in the home.
The product is mainly intended for European service providers who want to provide IPTV pay TV over Powerline. A much smaller percentage of European homes have coax than the States.
Equipment with the chipsets can stream Internet videos from places like YouTube and Hulu.com, Netflix movies and TV shows, stream IPTV TV shows, connect home computers or game consoles and enable VoIP throughout the home network.
Looking Ahead
Weissman said it’s the company’s first step in building its Powerline home network business. To which we’d add that it’s the company’s first step toward the upcoming G.hn standard. Chipmakers like CopperGate will be able to produce a single chip that’ll be compatible over any of a home’s existing three wires: coax, electrical and phone.
CopperGate intends to become the primary supplier of chips for G.hn.
The total market for G.hn is expected to be upwards of a billion chips or more. The growth comes from the explosion of the need by pay-TV services for high-speed, flicker-free and pirate-proof networks to deliver HD and ultimately perhaps 3D content to any and every device in the home.
If successful, G.hn’s only competitor will be MoCA, which uses coax and which Verizon and most cablecos are using. There’s Wi-Fi which so far at least, doesn’t have the guaranteed bandwidth and iron-clad security that content owners insist on – flicker-free and piracy-proof. G.hn is expected to block off the needed bandwidth when users begin viewing paid content such as pay-TV as MoCA also does.
If Wi-Fi could decimate the market for wireline home networking, it’s unlikely that Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros would have recently acquired HomePlug chipmaker Intellon.
Looking Backwards
Another reason CopperGate may have done a HomePlug chip relates to backwards compatibility. There are an estimated 30 million or so HomePlug devices installed today and there’ll probably be another 10 to 20 million installed over the next five years before sales begin diminishing.
By definition, G.hn is not backwards compatible with any existing home network standard. A telco that wants to start using G.hn gear isn’t going to want to go back and replace all its HomePlug gear installations.
Adding HomePlug or MoCA or HomePNA to G.hn will require chipmakers like CopperGate to add HomePlug chips to their G.hn chipsets. By mastering HomePlug technology now Coppergate is likely to get some portion of the existing Powerline market but more importantly get deals with service providers that want to phase in to G.hn.
To that end, we expect CopperGate will eventually announce two hybrid G.hn chipsets – one for HomePlug and one for HomePNA.
HomePlug AV, the newest version of HomePlug, is not interoperable with any prior HomePlug versions. It can run on the same wire with prior versions but cannot operate on any devices that are based on prior HomePlug versions.
The HomePlug AV chip that CopperGate will have is fully compatible and interoperable with any existing HomePlug AV devices. There are about 5 million HomePlug AV devices already installed, all using chips from Atheros’ newly acquired Intellon, which fathered HomePlug. |
