HomeGrid Forum

Linley Group: "battle of proprietary home-networking tech nears end"

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.

AT&T Speaks Out on G.hn

AT&T Labs' Tom Starr has been involved in the development of G.hn almost from the beginning.  And he has a unique insight into this next-generation standard.  He knows how the technology landscape for service providers around the world is changing.  He also knows how new multi-play and managed services are straining the current generation of technology. 

Find out what Tom knows, by downloading this new webinar.  

10 Things You Should Know About G.hn

This blog post ("Top Ten Things You Need to Know About the New G.hn Standard") includes a list of the most important benefits provided by G.hn, with a discussion on topics like security, Quality of Service, energy efficiency, performance over powerlines and more.

Click here to read the complete post ("Top Ten Things You Need to Know About the New G.hn Standard")

G.hn: data rate analysis

This blog post ("How fast can G.hn be?") includes a detailed analysis of the maximum theoretical performance we can expect from the G.hn standard when operating over coaxial cable.

[...] actual throughput provided by any communications technology is heavily dependent on both the PHY (Physical Layer) and DLL (Data Link Layer) design. [..] Although the PHY for G.hn is described in Recommendation G.9960, which received consent in December 2008, the most important aspects of the DLL have not become stable (ie, become "baseline", using ITU-T terminology) until April 2009. With both PHY and DLL in place, we can now work out some numbers to estimate how fast a G.hn implementation could run in theory.[...]

Click here to read the complete analysis ("How fast can G.hn be?")

Update on G.hn from HomePNA

The HomePNA Alliance, which in February announced its plan to work with HomeGrid Forum and other organizations to promote the G.hn standard, has posted an update on G.hn on their blog:

In case you were wondering, G.hn is continuing to astound standards watchers by making good progress. Work at the April meeting, held the week before last, focused on two areas – resolving the remaining comments on the “foundation” document and new submissions on the G.hn MAC.

(You can read the rest at the HomePNA blog).

New Whitepaper on Coexistence

One of the questions commonly asked about G.hn technology is: "How will this new generation technology interact with existing first-gen products already in the market?"  This new whitepaper from HomeGrid Forum answers that question.  In short:

When G.hn technologies are deployed onto home wiring that already supports previously installed home networking technologies, they should, as a part of a migration path toward a fully compliant G.hn solution, be able to coexist with these existing technologies to provide an acceptable user experience.

This paper covers the details around coexistence and interoperability, especially with technologies that use powerline and coax cable.  You can download this document and others from the HomeGrid Forum Resource Library.   

Check Out the G.hn Technical Overview

There's a new webinar in HomeGrid Forum's Resource Library.  It's a G.hn Technical Overview and it covers a whole range of topics including the security and performance characteristics of the technology, error correction schemes, band plan, quality of service approach and much more.  The material is presented by Chano Gomez of DS2, Stefano Galli from Panasonic, and Barry O'Mahony, Intel.   

It can be downloaded now by registering here.

Multiple industries converging around the G.hn standard

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."