Arris-made powerline adapters with G.hn chips have shown up in Canada with a Bell Canada (BC) label. They are an optional powerline network adapter for use with Bell Canada’s 4K whole home DVR that also supports HDR.
Bell Canada’s sales support and a usually reliable source in Canada have confirmed that Bell Canada’s pass through powerline adapter, made by Arris but branded BC, has Marvell’s G.hn chips. It’s intended to work with BC’s new VIP5662W IPTV receiver/DVR for 4K, also made by Arris. It can support up to five remote receivers for connecting TVs in other rooms. The remote receivers support WiFi and are $7 CAD ($5.40 USD) each per month. The VIP5662W has four WiFi antennas and a Bluetooth antenna. It also has Broadcom’s 7252 SoC and a Toshiba hard drive that holds up to 150 hours of 4K content or 320 hours of HD content.
Bell Canada said that it had previously offered HomePlug powerline adapters. It also offers coax adapters that have HPNA technology, many in adapters made by Motorola, which Arris acquired. That could make BC a candidate to use G.hn adapters that can support both G.hn and HPNA, where it is already installed, and G.hn where it is not.
Bell’s 4K Whole Home PVR is available to BC’s Fibre TV customers in Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and Québec City for Canadian $599 ($455). It is also available to Bell Aliant FibreOP TV subscribers in the Atlantic region of Canada, much of which is so far east of Maine that it lays in the Atlantic time zone.
BC’s G.hn powerline adapter is so new that inside sources initially said there was no such product – before eventually confirming it after going away to do some research. BC has not revealed how much it is selling the adapter for but said that someone at a BC retail store would give us the price.
What we do know is that it is what is called a pass-through adapter, which means that it has an electrical socket so that consumers don’t lose one of their highly-valued electrical outlets.
Because Bell Canada is the purveyor and because the market is for 4K TVs and content, we reckon that Bell Canada has ordered many thousands of the powerline adapters in anticipation of a) 4K becoming the dominant TV resolution, especially now that 4K sets are as inexpensive as HD sets were two years ago, and b) BC’s desire to deliver picture-perfect, flicker free 4K TV. Arris and Marvell may have been handed some nice orders considering that at the end of 2015 BC had 3.4 million broadband subscribers and more than 2.7 million pay TV subscribers.
There are several significant points about BC’s decision to purchase quantities of G.hn powerline adapters:
- As would be expected from an incumbent telco, BC does a very thorough job of testing in the labs and in the field. Reportedly the tests were very extensive and thorough – and involved comparison tests against stiff competition such as MoCA 2.0 with bonding and HomePlug AV2 with MIMO.
- BC, like many other cablecos and telcos, probably realizes that the WiFi networks in most homes are not ready for even one stream of 4K. Because BC wants to sell its 4K pay TV service, it wanted to make sure that subscribers got the very best, flicker free 4K picture.
- The BC order for G.hn adapters is, to the best of our knowledge, the very first one in the world – other than in Korea and Portugal where they are being used to extend broadband.
- Other telcos will see what BC is doing and, given BC’s reputation, will seriously investigate G.hn gear – if they haven’t already started testing it. We suspect that other major telcos may be on the verge of selecting G.hn as their home network wireline standard – in fact some may have but not yet publicly announced it. The next step after adapters would be for G.hn to be built into the router/gateway/whole home DVR rather than forcing subscribers to install adapters. In that way every home’s electrical wires would become a powerline network. And that in turn would mean that makers of CE gear could build it into their products so that when the user plugs a TV set into an electrical outlet, it would immediately be on the net.
- The win at Bell Canada gives some credence to the HomeGrid Forum’s claim that G.hn is a “carrier class” home network technology. But, one win is only one win. Let’s see what the future holds. HomeGrid needs a couple more wins to prove that G.hn is a “world class” technology.
- Lastly, 4K is here big time and is already having an impact on the need for more bandwidth for both broadband and home networks. Service providers realize that and are upping the performance of their broadband and home network products. You never, ever see an announcement about a new broadband or home network product or service that doesn’t list 4K as a driving force. And HDR, which BC’s 4K DVR also supports, is the next big thing in TV. Although HDR does not need as much additional bandwidth as 4K does, its startling picture quality will prompt people to buy a 4K TV set that does need more bandwidth for watching OTT services, the main source for 4K content for several years to come.
But where are the Arris-brand G.hn adapters for retailers that we heard about last summer and again at CES in January? Since then Actiontec has started shipping MoCA 2.0 to 11ac WiFi adapters that use Quantenna’s very impressive 4×4 11ac WiFi chips. The Actiontec MoCA-to-WiFi extenders tested the best of any WiFi extenders that we tested in a 2,400 square-foot standalone home and in a 1,500 square-foot apartment with 15-inch thick adobe walls and solid wooden doors. We are still not able to get similar G.hn coax-to-WiFi adapters for testing but surely they will come if G.hn’s coax version is as good as G.hn backers say it is.
This first ran in Rider Research’s Online Reporter.