G.hn home wiring broadband technology ready for prime time

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 08 June 2011 11:28

Business IT - Technology

Proponents of the G.hn home networking standard have hailed the success of the latest multi-vendor interoperability event as evidence that the technology is now on the cusp of commercial availability.

The G.hn family of standards, developed by the ITU, is designed to enable gigabit per second communications over the wiring commonly found in residential premises: ac power, telephony and coax. The aim is that a single G.hn chip in a TV or other piece of domestic equipment will be able to communicate over whatever of these three media is available.

The interoperability test was conducted by the HomeGrid Forum - a body created to promote G.hn - the Broadband Forum and four silicon vendors - Lantiq, Marvell Semiconductor, Metanoia, and Sigma Designs - at the ITU headquarters in Geneva and organised by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL).

According to the HomeGrid Forum "the event presented the first open opportunity for silicon vendors to test the interoperability of their products, based on the G.hn home networking standard, which will be globally deployed by many service providers, PC manufacturers, appliance manufacturers and consumer electronics companies'¦The success achieved highlights the maturity of the various vendors' designs as well as the completeness of the G.hn standard."

Matt Theall, president of HomeGrid Forum, said: "G.hn is here. It's now. Service providers are excited we have concluded this event '¦G.hn is already a reality with silicon now ready for deployment."

The Broadband Forum was rather more reserved in its enthusiasm. CEO Robin Mersh, said: "The Broadband Forum is very happy that the first G.hn Interoperability Plugfest has been completed successfully. We look forward to the next steps in completing the test plans required to enable interoperability of G.hn products."

The HomeGrid Forum added that it was "rolling out [our] compliance and interoperability certification program later this year allowing HomeGrid Forum certified products to be brought to the market this year and establishing a new industry benchmark of technology excellence for wired home networking."

However G.hn has its detractors. According to Wikipedia, "G.hn opponents believe that this standard has a major deficiency in that it won't interoperate with legacy wireline standards such as HomePlug for powerline and Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) for coaxial cable."

Wikipedia notes: "There are millions of deployed devices in the market that are based on these two standards and future G.hn-based products will not interoperate with any of these. Opponents also believe that a single standard for the three different wired mediums will result in a lowest common denominator solution that offers lower performance on all of the wires as compared to current wireline standards that optimize communications for the specific wired environment (ie HomePlug AV and IEEE1901 for powerline, MoCA for coax)."