New standard to wire up the digital home in the age of multimedia

Stuart Corner
Monday, 15 December 2008 00:10

Business IT - Technology

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has released a new standard that will enable communications over phone, power and coaxial cables in the home at up to 700Mbps for the delivery of bandwidth intensive multimedia content.

The new standard ITU-T Recommendation G.9960 is the first in the ITU-T's G.hn family of standards. It will enable chip manufacturers to build transceivers that can be incorporated into set-top boxes, residential gateways, home computers, home audio systems, DVD players, TVs or any other device that might be connected to a network now or in the future.

According to the ITU, products incorporating these chips could be on the market as early as 2010. It quotes Joyce Putscher, principal analyst at market research firm In-Stat, saying: "Service operators have been looking for an international standard that encompasses multiple existing-wire mediums for video distribution. G.hn meets that requirement and it seems clear that with significant industry backing from service providers, semiconductor and equipment vendors, and the fast rate at which the process is moving to achieve a standard, we will see first equipment by 2010."

In the face of current differing standards for the carriage of data over power, telephone and coaxial cable in the home, Wi-Fi has become the dominant technology. However many service providers argue that it is not fast enough and in some cases have taken to supplying broadband over powerline technologies to their customers to provide the final connection from the entry point of their services into the home to the users' devices. See these earlier iTWire stories: The home of the future: wireless or powerline broadband? and  Powerline battles WiFi to network the broadband home.

G.9960 focuses on the physical or PHY layer of the communication. In step with ITU guidelines on new standards development, several power saving modes have been incorporated. Work is continuing to develop a recommendation for the media access control (MAC) layer.

According to Malcolm Johnson, director of the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. "With G.hn, every wire in every home around the world can become part of a home entertainment network. This will enable seamless communication between computers, HDTVs and telephones over existing wires. I expect that this exciting new technology will also foster innovations such as energy efficient smart appliances, home automation and telemedicine devices."

According to the ITU G.hn "has achieved remarkable industry backing even before its publication...An industry group - the HomeGrid Forum - has been formed to market G.hn worldwide and to create a compliance and interoperability programme to ensure that products based on the standard will operate in any home around the world."

Another industry analyst, Michael Wolf, research director at ABI Research, is also very bullish about the prospects for G.hn. "If G.hn sees integration into carrier devices by 2010, we expect that some 42 million G.hn-compliant nodes will ship in 2013 in devices such as set-top boxes, residential gateways and other service provider CPE hardware."