On February 25th HomeGrid Forum announced agreements with global technology organizations Consumer Electronics Powerline Communication Alliance (CEPCA), HomePNA™ Alliance, and Universal Powerline Association (UPA). These groups – which represent the technology underpinnings of many IPTV deployments – are joining with HomeGrid Forum to promote G.hn and ensure co-existence between G.hn-based products and those using other current generation powerline, phoneline, and coax networking technologies.
For anybody not familiar with the home networking industry, it's easy to underestimate the importance of this announcement, but if you take look at public information available in the membership pages of these organizations you can see that they include some of the most influential companies in several key industries such as Home Networking (Netgear, D-link, Buffalo), Consumer Electronics (Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Philips, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sony, Toshiba, Yamaha) and Telecommunications (AT&T, 2wire, Motorola, Scientific Atlanta, Alcatel-Lucent), just to name a few.
G.hn is rapidly becoming the standard that will unify the wired networking industry and will create new growth opportunities in all those markets (such as PC, CE, Telco, and home networking) in which high-speed connectivity and full interoperability around a single PHY/MAC standard are key requirements.
Rick Merritt at EE Times recently covered this announcement:
"[...] The move is another step toward industry support for the ITU G.hn effort to create a single wired standard for home networks over powerline, coax and telephone lines."
Comments