Joseph Byrne, Senior Analyst at Linley Group (one of the leading research firms for semiconductors), has written an in-depth post ("Fruitless battle of proprietary home-networking tech nears end") on the current situation of the wired home networking industry and the potential of G.hn to solve the fragmentation problem:
There are two efforts abreast to change the situation. The most promising of the two is the G.hn spec being developed under the auspices of the ITU. The developers of this spec made two sage decisions.
The first is to converge on a single interface-regime for all three media: coax, phoneline, and powerline. The goal is to separate the network from the media, eliminating Layer-Two bridges and simplifying vendors’ efforts to design chips for each media. The second is to jettison backward compatibility from the spec. Vendors are free to add backward compatibility, but it is not required. Because home-networking technologies have been poorly adopted (compared with Wi-Fi, for example), the installed base is relatively small. Vendors are likely to build in backward compatibility to provide existing customers, who are mainly carriers, with an upgrade path. The G.hn spec was completed in December 2008 and is likely to be ratified by this time next year.Joseph makes some predictions:
G.hn is likely to emerge the victor for powerline and phoneline networking. Telcos tend to favor ITU specs, and G.hn has the support of AT&T and BT, which is on the board of the group promoting G.hn, the Home Grid Forum. U.S. retailer Best Buy is on the board.
Comments