Intellon and DS2 are in a death battle over the standards for BPL, both for use inside the home and for access BPL ...

Intellon Fires Broadside In BPL Battle
April 18, 2006


Broadband over powerline (BPL) chip house Intellon says it’s just passed the five-million-chips-shipped milestone for its HomePlug Powerline Alliance specification-compliant silicon along with hitting a production rate of one million chips per quarter.

The manufacturer diplomatically didn’t mention Spanish BPL house and arch-enemy Design of Systems on Silicon S.A. (DS2) in its announcement, but the target was clear.

Intellon and DS2 are in a death battle over the standards for BPL, both for use inside the home and for access BPL – the delivery of broadband over power company lines to a building. Contrasted with Intellon’s claim of five million chips now shipped, DS2 claims one million. However, DS2 claims to be well-ahead in the battle to deliver chips capable of 200 Mb/s, which Intellon now says it will soon start shipping and with several U.S. companies to announce product by mid-year (a couple of Europeans are already announced).

Actually, Intellon is bragging about 10 million chips, not five, although only five million are HomePlug-compliant. The other five million are chips Intellon built for use in the trucking industry to help that industry meet a U.S. Department of Transportation mandate that tractor-trailer drivers had to have a system to know if the automatic braking system (ABS) on the trailers they were pulling was working or not. What Intellon crafted to meet the DoT mandate, handed down some five years ago, was a BPL transceiver that works over the standard electric cabling harness that already links the cab and tractor trailer, eliminating the need for some sort of costly retrofit.

As it turns out, that BPL system, chosen over wireless solutions because of reliability issues, is now on just about every tractor trailer on American highways – a little-known business on which Intellon has cashed in. The relevance of that to the broadband industry, the company says, is that it proves Intellon knows how to churn out the chips. To read more about the company’s BPL strategy, read today’s issue of Broadband Business Forecast.



The new 200 Mbps BROADBAND over POWER LINES Technology