Broadband over home wiring bodies unite to push ITU standard

Stuart Corner
Friday, 27 February 2009 01:24

IT Industry - Market

Universal Powerline Association & HomeGrid Forum have agreed to support the ITU's recently released G.hn standard for broadband networking over domestic power, coax and phone lines.

UPA is an industry consortium set up to provide a forum for the development of interoperable and open specifications to cover all broadband over powerline markets and applications. The HomeGrid Forum is a global, non-profit trade group promoting the International Telecommunication Union's Standardisation Sector (ITU-T) G.hn standardisation of multimedia over coax, power and phone lines.

The two organisation have signed an MoU for "joint research, development, and commercialisation of networking technologies and products ensuring coexistence, interoperability, and specification compliance."

President of the HomeGrid Forum, Matt Theall of Intel, said: "HomeGrid's goal of a single specification and standard for 1Gbps home networking on all wires: coax, electrical lines, and phone lines will greatly benefit from the UPA's contributions given their broad experience and worldwide deployments of powerline and coaxial networking devices."

Under the multi-year MoU, the UPA (which last year began development of PowerMAX, its next generation specification process for 400Mbps+ powerline communications networking) and HomeGrid Forum have committed to cooperating to create a single MAC and PHY protocol for transporting multimedia across a home's existing wiring to benefit consumers globally.

The ITU-T released in December 2008 G.9960, it first new standard in the G.hn family 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.

G.9960 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.

G.9960 focuses on the physical or PHY layer of the communication. Work is continuing to develop a recommendation for the media access control (MAC) layer.