Speed kills. That’s what they say when it comes to driving, but speed is the killer application when it comes to broadband and home networking – whether Wi-Fi (wireless Ethernet), MoCA (coax cable), HomePNA (coax cable and/or copper wires) or HomePlug (electrical wiring). Consumers want to use their home network to send video from room to room – from their pay-TV set-top box and from PCs to all the TVs and PCs and other viewing devices (think iPods) in the home as well as for traditional network tasks like sharing printers and files.
Video needs lots of bandwidth and high-definition video needs lots and lots of bandwidth. Consumers’ move to high-definition as their first choice in video quality can be proven by standing near the door of an electronics retailer and watching how many high-definition TV sets are being sold. It’s also shown by the pay-TV companies’ mad scramble to add more HD content, with DirecTV, for example, promising it will have 100 HD channels by year-end.
The companies (52 of them) that are overseeing the development of the MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) home network standard this week said the alliance has approved a new specification called MoCA 1.1. It offers five major enhancements:
– Speeds up to 175 Mbps, as compared to the prior 100 Mbps.
– Prioritization of multiple streams of HD content for more reliable and more consistent quality.
– Incorporation of PQoS (parameterized quality of service) for bandwidth management and prioritization of video and data streams for real time delivery.
– Packet aggregation to speed things up.
– Increase in the home network’s size from the current eight nodes to 16 nodes.
The enhancements allow room for personal data and print and file sharing on the entertainment network and ensure optimal performance for the home’s entertainment network of the future. Broadband and pay-TV service providers will be able to “future-proof”their deployments by building in the bandwidth today that will be needed to support future advanced services that will be made possible with 100 Mbgs broadband.
Home networks also have to carry personal data – print jobs, copying files from one PC to another – in addition to being used to transmit pay-TV shows around the home. The extra bandwidth that comes from packet aggregation also provides room for personal data to be transmitted simultaneously with entertainment video.
Broadband services providers all now offer to deliver multiple services to and within the home: pay-TV, Internet access and landline phone service. All of the services can now use the same network in the home.
There are more TV sets per home than ever and each has to be fed a video stream. Many homes now have a second or third PC, even if that includes a laptop from the office. Each one needs constant access to the Net when they are in use and they are also used as a source for videos to be viewed on the TV set. Apple (Wi-Fi pre-release n), Netgear (pre-release n and HomePlug) and others sell set-top boxes called digital media adapters that send video streams from the PC to any TV set in the home that has one of their boxes attached. The boxes can also be used to stream music and other audio to a surround sound system. It’s expected that the technology that’s now in the separate boxes will soon be built-in to the TV set, reducing costs, increasing the number of people that use it and limiting that mess of wires behind the TV set.
The cable TV companies in particular are interested in higher speeds within the home because they are developing technology that will allow them to deliver upwards of 150 Mbps to the home. Verizon, which already uses MoCA in its FiOS pay-TV set-top boxes, is offering broadband speeds up to 50 Mbps and is pushing HDTV.
Speed in broadband and home networks is like money – no one ever complained they had too much. There is the tale of a telephone company executive who said five or six years ago, “Broadband at 1 Mbps! Whatever would people use that much speed for?” Today a phone company executive might exclaim, “Broadband at 100 Mbps! Whatever would people use that much speed for?”
With the same network carrying multiple services, the prioritization and management of real time data and video streams becomes extremely critical, for example avoiding collision or interference, and delivering a complete and on time video payload. That’s why the MoCA crowd upgraded the specifications so that a provisioning mechanism that can be built into a variety of products that target a wide range of applications.
“Service providers are always looking for better methods of bandwidth management for premium services and content,” said Anton Monk, MoCA CTO. “They recognize the compelling value of converged services such as premium content, personal content, and the desire for Internet-based services. All of these services need to coexist on a single in-home network but there is a real need to protect and guarantee the bandwidth for the premium/pay services in order to ensure the “quality of experience” the consumer expects.”
Monk added, “This extension has immediate benefits for end-consumers as well, as they can accessorize the network with other MoCA certified devices and continue to access content anytime and anywhere without disruption and without any reconfiguration of their network.”
Applications that will benefit immediately with MoCA 1.1 include:
– Whole-house distribution of HD video, audio, data, gaming and voice content.
– Whole-home networking of CATV STB, DBS STB, ATSC STB, and FTTP STB functionality as an add-on to existing methods of distribution or as a replacement for existing methods of distribution.
– Home networking backbone for consumer electronics technologies (wireless, Ethernet/IP, IEEE-1394).
– Set-top boxes that can receive both premium content and personal content.
– Sharing of game stations, computers, network-attached storage units, data gateways (DSL, DOCSIS, FTTP, DBS, Terrestrial) directly to video devices/displays through PVR and iTV.
– Simultaneous streaming of multiple HD video streams.
Products involved in the digital entertainment distribution ecosphere include PC plug-in and embedded cards, STBs, digital satellite receivers, DVRs/PVRs, digital TVs, DVD, home theater systems, home media servers, bridges for other interface types (USB, Ethernet, IEEE1394, etc.), adapters for legacy STBs, LAN equipment such as routers, switches and hubs, game consoles, wireless repeaters, extenders and access points.
Devices that support the new MoCA 1.1 specification will soon be on the market. Chipmakers have or will soon have chipsets that device makers can use in their boxes. For example, Entropic announced in June that its new MoCA-compliant chipsets would support speeds up to 180 Mbps.
The new version’s enhancements, especially the increase in the number of nodes, will allow MoCA to be built-in to retail devices so consumers can use the MoCA network to connect other devices right out of the box-plug and play such as gaming consoles and digital media adapters.
Wi-Fi is currently the most popular home networking scheme (remember when home builders were pre-wiring new homes with Ethernet cable?). Wi-Fi has severe limitations. It’s slow although development work is continuing that will increase its speeds. It uses unlicensed spectrum, which makes security (as in the neighbor connecting and copying files) and quality potential problems. It doesn’t have the “quality of service” (QoS) capabilities that wired network schemes like MoCA has.
Wi-Fi is not going away, not now and probably not ever unless another wireless network scheme is developed that’s as easy to install and use as Wi-Fi. Let’s not forget that there’ll be a gazillion devices that will be sold over the next few years that’ll have Wi-Fi built in – everything from iPhones and iPod touches to hybrid handsets that access both cellular phone networks and Internet-based phone networks like Skype.
One of the big appeals of MoCA is that it uses the existing coax cable in the home, the wires the cable TV companies installed over the years to connect all the TV sets in the home. Outside the US, cable TV was not as popular so the percentage of homes with existing coax cable in multiple rooms is much smaller. Ruckus Wireless has developed a supercharged but proprietary version of Wi-Fi that many phone companies outside the US use to deliver IPTV video within the home.
AT&T decided not to use MoCA in its U-verse pay TV because it did not want to have any conflicts over who can use the coax wiring in multi-tenant buildings. It picked HomePNA, which can use either coax or the existing copper telephone wires.
WiMAX is a probable replacement for municipal Wi-Fi networks and for use on college campuses. It cannot, in any of the WiMAX versions that are being developed, be a replacement for Wi-Fi, MoCA, HomePNA or HomePlug in the home. It requires licensed bandwidth – and that you can only get from the government at auction – and only in big and very pricey swatches. WiMAX is considered a threat to mobile phone networks, not to networks that are used within the home.
At this point it appears that content providers (the studios and networks) and their distributors (the pay-TV services) all prefer MoCA networking because of its speed, security from piracy and quality of service. There is a conflict though – consumers like wireless but content owners and content providers want wired networks.