US research company IMS Research reckons that ‘no new wire’ strategies are set to take off after years in the slow lane. It is referring to products like MoCA, HomePlug and HPNA, although technically both MoCA and HPNA often use newly laid extensions to wiring systems which are already in place. Set top boxes previously didn’t have phone lines to them and Multi-room DVRs are new, and also require new cables and these are the most frequent new use for these technologies, although they market themselves as ‘no new wires.’
The boom is set to take Pay TV systems by storm over the next five years IMS says, and we can’t say we disagree. IMS has the benefit of doing all the boring work, counting all the devices out there and working out what vendors expect to sell and operators expect to buy next year and so on, but from where we sit, existing volumes, and pricing curves point in the same direction.
‘Although ‘no-new-wire’ technologies such as HomePlug, HomePNA and MoCA have been around for many years now, they’ve remained relatively niche up until recently,’ said the report’s author, Alex Green. ‘However, the accelerating uptake of IPTV services has fuelled significant growth in this area. Services from companies such as Verizon and AT&T have pushed the use of these ‘no-new-wire’ technologies up significantly, which has been particularly good news for the main IC suppliers,’ continued Green.
Well it doesn’t take much knowledge of the market to do two Google lookups and realize that these opposing technologies are scaling with Verizon and AT&T, and now make up 5.5 million installs over the past 3 to 4 years in the US alone without counting the fact that Comcast and other cable operators are using MoCA or one of the other technologies for multi-room DVRs.
The report also acknowledges what we all know already which is that multi-room DVR services are what’s giving these technologies their second wind. Although we would anticipate that the 750 million or so pay TV homes around the world are also about ready to take their fair share of these technologies, outside of the 100 million or so Pay TV homes in the US. BRIC countries are currently scaling up and are at early HD install levels, which are the precursor to multi-room DVRs in the next few years, while Western Europe, Japan and Korea will be aggressively pursuing these technologies with a further few hundred million existing pay TV homes right now.
However in the US, IMS points out, a number of high profile US TV service providers have started building MoCA into every set-top. That trend is definitely going to continue as the set top function in the household makes more sense to be married to the home gateway, than to sit by the largest TV set in the home.
IMS also sees problems coming with the proliferation of new technologies aimed at copying the ‘no new wires’ strategy and it includes the ITU’s G.Hn and the IEEE’s P1901 standards, which it says will cause nothing but confusion, as it concludes that despite the technology players behind them putting efforts into G.Hn, their separate initiatives will still be on the market, in the form of UPA, HomePNA, HomePlug and HD-PLC. The liaison between MoCA and HomePlug for generation 2.0 of both technologies still leaves people guessing what this actually signifies. Well we thought that IMS was going to tell us? Hmm. Perhaps you have to buy the report for that.
IMS forecasts that in 2015 close to 200 million ‘no-new-wire’ chips will be shipped and by the end of 2015, there will be an installed base of over 110 million ‘no-new-wire’ homes. That still leaves an awful lot of growth going forwards for further growth and alternative technologies.
And by then the wireless wars will be well under way between WiGig, WirelessHD and all the others we have written about over the past two years, all starting to impinge on the ‘No New Wires’ players.