Weird product of the week must come from Arris at NAB in the US. Arris seems to us, on the back of the FCC open set top saga, a highly threatened business, in part because it has such a weak retail brand, and the US set top future may become retail. Here it unveiled a retail product called SURFboard home networking, using RipCurrent (read G.hn) technology. Arris may be keen to throw out as many retail products as it can, to begin building that retail brand.
What this amounts to is an off the shelf family of products which uses something like IEEE 1905.1 translation technology so that WiFi and G.hn powerline can speak to one another easily. If this was introduced in China or even in Europe, this might make sense, but to introduce it in the US, where there is virtually no G.hn, and where MoCA is used on coax to connect most devices, makes almost no sense to us. It has been placed on Amazon for retail sale.
We have asked Arris some questions, but it could not get back to us in time for this issue, so we’re unsure of a few points, namely does it work as a mesh, which we think unlikely, because that might make this a neat product. A mesh would decide which backhaul route to use, WiFi or Powerline and pick the best one performing at any moment, and send some of a stream over one, and some over another.
The US powerline community has been all HomePlug to date and mostly retail, that’s because in the US, the presence of Coax in every home, makes the use of powerline cabling inferior except in a handful of circumstances. Operators don’t offer powerline connections because MoCA is at hand. Consumers can, and do use it to extend WiFi, which works sometimes, but not always, but invariably use HomePlug. A long time ago Best Buy said it would roll out G.hn device retail as soon as they were available, but this, so far, has not happened.
The issue with using G.hn is that Homeplug acts like a jamming device when it is on the same low power electricity segment, which is why in China, G.hn and HomePlug cannot be put into the same MDU low power segment, and a single HomePlug device used in an MDU can bring down all those G.hn devices. This was simply about when the protocols were designed. HomePlug felt no need to sense and avoid future powerline technologies, whereas G.hn had to play nice in order to come to market later, because HomePlug was already established. Having both sold in retail in the US will be confusing and lead to broadband blackouts.
Arris is selling it on the back of having no dead zones for your home WiFi, using G,hn to connect a router to a WiFi extender or two throughout your home. What it doesn’t say is that you will have to switch off all your HomePlug devices in order for it to work.
Arris says it is simple, with plug-and-play installation and iOS and Android apps to set you up giving control over network security as well. It also talks about you having a new WiFi outlet wherever you have a plug, but unless you want the WiFi to run at gigabit speeds and the internet backhaul to run at 20 Mbps (powerline is unpredictable), this is not for you. Given that pricing starts at $120 it seems like a lot of money for a potential headache.