Powerline home net camps mount urgent bid for unity

Powerline home net camps mount urgent bid for unity
Rick Merritt
(10/15/2007 9:00 AM EDT)

Santa Clara Calif. -- Opposing camps in powerline home networking will face off at an IEEE meeting in Boston this week over the path toward a unified standard. It's unclear whether anything will come of the eleventh-hour calls for compromise in advance of the Boston event, but separately players are stretching their technology to compete with everything from 802.11 to ZigBee.


Companies as diverse as Cisco, Echostar, Philips and Intel expressed support for powerline at the annual HomePlug Alliance convention here last week. But they also called on all sides to embrace standards and lower costs in a highly competitive environment.


Indeed, the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), a rising star among cable TV service providers, will turn up the heat this week, when it announces a 1.1 version of its spec that delivers 175 Mbits/second at the media access control level and supports parameterized quality-of-service.


By contrast, the two leading powerline technologies claim data rates of 95 and 65 Mbits/s and lack the parameterized QoS some service providers require.


On a brighter note, the HomePlug group has ratified a spec for a 700-kbit/s control network that will challenge ZigBee for networking of lights, alarms and white goods. The competing Universal Powerline Association (UPA) is working on a similar spec, which could be announced before mid-2008.


Meanwhile, executives from HomePlug, the UPA and the Consumer Electronics Powerline Communication Alli- ance (CEPCA), a group of mainly Japanese conglomerates, were in discussions last week on whether they could hammer out a joint proposal in time for this week's Boston meeting of the IEEE 1901 committee, which aims to set an overarching global standard for powerline home nets.


The IEEE 1901 group is considering two competing proposals. One brings together separate technologies from HomePlug and Pana- sonic; the other is from the UPA and has some backing from CEPCA.


HomePlug backers say they could have enough members to force and win a vote on their proposal in Boston. The effort defines a protocol that ensures separate HomePlug and Panasonic networks will not interfere and will be able to share data, as long as vendors support both entities' separate physical-layer technologies.


Not surprisingly, Oleg Logvinov, chief strategy officer of HomePlug and chief executive of Arkados Inc., which makes HomePlug chips, expects to see the Boston meeting select the HomePlug proposal. HomePlug now has 75 members, including Cisco, Comcast, Intel, Motorola, Sharp and Texas Instruments.


"That [outcome] would be bad for everyone," countered Chano Gomez, vice president of technology for Design of Systems on Silicon S.A. (DS2; Valencia, Spain), currently the sole chip maker for the UPA approach.


A pitch for unified PHY


UPA members say the better solution would be to define one physical-layer technology on which all parties could agree--even if doing so would require all sides to revise their silicon. Both HomePlug and UPA members said they would be willing to rework their chips, but it's not clear the camps can reach consensus on a single proposal.


"Right now, e-mails are flying back and forth between senior people in each organization to try to move this process forward," Brian Donnelly, chairman of the UPA marketing group, said in an interview last week. "We want to have an agreement before going into the [Boston] meeting."


Donnelly is also vice president of marketing and business development at Corinex Communications Corp., which sells powerline systems based on chips from DS2. "If we have to force our primary silicon provider to make concessions, we will do that, and we have buy-in from DS2," he said.


"We need a standard going forward," said Martin Manniche, senior director of engineering at Linksys, a unit of Cisco Systems that makes Wi-Fi and powerline networking gear.


At the HomePlug event, Manniche called on chip makers to design more-integrated parts, in order to drive down costs of powerline modules to $50 per pair. He also called on the industry to adopt extensions defined by Cisco to the Universal Plug and Play Forum's QoS standards. Cisco's so-called Video Quality Experience spec lets systems restrict access to a network to ensure uninterrupted video delivery.


A separate UPnP effort for similar QoS capabilities "will mostly likely take another 12 to 18 months" to complete, Manniche said, "and the industry can't wait."


Whatever happens in Boston, the HomePlug approach commands a majority of the powerline market and is expected to continue to do so, said Joyce Putscher, principal analyst for home networking at market watcher In-Stat (Scottsdale, Ariz.).


"Having a standard is not always 100 percent critical, because you can also have a de facto standard," she said.


Donnelly said Corinex is selling systems using the UPA approach to more than 30 service providers and 40 utilities worldwide. It switched from HomePlug to DS2 silicon in 2005 because DS2 was the first to deliver chips that offered 95-Mbit/s throughput--data rates the HomePlug group is only beginning to approach this year.



Last week's conference was a coming-out party for the HomePlug AV standard, which delivers 65 Mbits/s at the MAC layer. The alliance announced it had thus far certified 40 products to the specification.


But the new spec is not backward compatible with HomePlug 1.0. Thus, users like Echostar, which has shipped 2 million satellite receivers using HomePlug 1.0, will not migrate to AV. Instead, Echostar will maintain HomePlug as a data network and adopt MoCA as a video delivery network, in part because of the latter's support for parameterized QoS.


Broadcom and Conexant are developing chips for the MoCA standard, as is Entropic Communications, which pioneered the technology.


Powerline backers are trying to catch up, at least in the throughput race. Both sides are researching techniques that could appear in products in 2009 or later.


The HomePlug proposal to the IEEE group includes a modified-physical-layer chip that would achieve about 40 percent greater throughput than the Home- Plug AV spec, said Logvinov. Higher spectral efficiency and better forward error correction are likely techniques the HomePlug group will use in next-generation approaches, he added.


The UPA's proposal uses its existing physical-layer technology, but the al- liance's road map will embrace data rates in "multiples of the 200 Mbytes/s we offer today [at the physical layer]," said Donnelly.


Gomez said DS2 is studying three ways to provide that boost. It could increase spectral efficiency beyond today's 6.6 bits/s per Hz. It could employ spectrum in the 30 to 80 MHz not used by today's products. Or it could dynamically shift power levels to accommodate multiple nets on a link, a technique pioneered in wireless networks.


Powerline backers may have more success expanding at the low end by attacking areas served by control networks such as ZigBee.


Startup Yitran (Beer-Sheva, Israel) is showing a controller, smaller than a postage stamp, that will sample early in 2008 using the HomePlug Command and Control spec the company helped define. The Yitran module taps a new, 180-nm MAC/PHY device that will sell for about $2.50, plus external components costing another 50 cents.


The module is said to enable a 7-kbit/s control network in the 100- to 400-MHz powerline band. The startup has licensed its technology to Renesas, which is expected to have its own chips late next year. Other chip makers now can license the HomePlug control spec at no charge up front. Royalties are about 5 cents per device in high volumes.


Yitran hopes to get the module embedded in white goods, lights, security systems and other household de- vices. It has a design win with a utility in Spain that could drive sales of as many as 20 million units, said Avner Matmor, the company's chief executive.


Control-net protocol


The HomePlug group expects to finish work by the end of the year on a standard protocol for the control net. In the meantime, Yitran is using the Simple Control Protocol defined by Microsoft, an early investor in the startup.


The UPA started working on a similar spec in September but will not divulge details until sometime in 2008. Members Cypress, DS2 and Toshiba are among the likely candidates to make chips for the spec. Cypress and Toshiba are already said to be working on broadband powerline chips using the DS2 technology.


Despite the heady competition, the market for all home networks is growing, said Michael Greeson, principal analyst at The Diffusion Group (Plano, Texas). The market watcher estimates as many as 185 million homes will have in-house networks by 2011, with an average of six devices on each net.


"Increasingly, consumer vendors see network connectivity as a way to differentiate their products," said Greeson, who added that connectivity will hit mainstream products by 2010.


"The biggest competitor is Wi-Fi," he said, "but it is inadequate for video and can be a nightmare to set up, and that's driving product returns."


A representative from Philips said the company is about to roll out an integrated Internet Protocol TV set using 802.11n chips from Atheros. Philips is also investigating powerline for products including speakers, DVD recorders and set-top boxes.


But powerline will probably not be used in Philips TVs at least until 2010, the spokesman said.