China Telecom is the world’s largest telco as measured by number of telephone subscribers. It may soon become the world’s largest purchaser of home network equipment, so its selection of G.hn as its wireline standard will send shockwaves through the home networking industry.
We have known that G.hn players have been saying this for most of this year, citing RFPs which specified the technology, but having China Telecom say it, itself is another matter. China Telecom has 172 million access subscribers, and has 3 million net broadband adds each quarter.
MoCA officials had been hopeful earlier this year that this decision could be turned around and went on a trading mission to find opportunities for MoCA there. It may well be one of the technologies that are used to bring broadband to MDUs across China, but it is clearly not going be the technology of choice for home networks.
China Telecom outlined its G.hn plans for field tests and deployment at a meeting last week in its headquarters in Beijing alongside equipment and G.hn chip makers. It said it would no longer keep secret its selection of G.hn as its standard wireline technology. Those plans will hearten G.hn backers.
Having already successfully conducted in-house trials, China Telecom said it would start conducting field trials by the end July and wants to accelerate to deployments by end of year. The field trials will take place in three to six provinces, each of which will have at least 100 locations.
The product makers are all understood to be well-known Chinese brands but we have not yet been able to find out which ones yet. It’s said there are about six equipment makers involved.
Marvell chips are in the first test products. Products with Sigma Design’s newly certified G.hn chips would also be included in all the field trials. G.hn chips from Metanoia are expected for the start-up of the trials and perhaps shortly thereafter Xingtera’s G.hn chips. The HomeGrid Forum, which conducts G.hn certification, has not yet said publicly that Metanoia and Xingtera’s G.hn chips have been certified but will be under pressure to make sure they are certified in time for deployments. All field trials so far are specifically for the powerline version of G.hn.
China Telecom said it hopes to learn from the trials what the field deployment experience is like, the mitigation of neighboring network interference, any interoperability problems and real world customer issues that no lab tests can ever fully replicate.
China Telecom did not say whether or not it had actually tested MoCA, but given this was really for powerline connectivity, it was more likely to be up against HomePlug AV, which is behind G,hn. There is also a big market in China for Wi-Fi because consumers want to connect portable devices to the Internet.
China Telecom also did not mention whether it had ever considered testing HomePlug and its selection of G.hn must be a disappointment to makers of HomePlug chips and equipment. The China Telecom move also means that G.hn has a major in-road into the world’s telcos, whose universally available telephone networks mean that in time they could become the largest purchasers of home network equipment, purchasing more that cable and satellite TV companies combined.
Repeated delays in completing the G.hn standard and in building and certifying G.hn chips would, many thought, give the HomePlug chipmakers time to complete the AV2 version and compete successfully against G.hn for telco business in the US and Western Europe. It might be that G.hn simply beat HomePlug AV2 to the punch or that China wanted to have a standard where its manufacturers had contributed to the intellectual property. The fact that G.hn is an ITU standard may also have made a difference. The United Nations-owned ITU is the telcos’ ‘most favored’ standards body.
HomePlug practically owns the retail marketplace despite MoCA’s attempts to unseat it. Powerline networking has the advantage over coax because practically every home in the world has an electrical outlet in every room; many have electrical outlets on every wall in every room. G.hn will have a hard time edging into the retail market ‘ although the retail chain Best Buy is a long time G.hn member.
We would not be surprised if AT&T is the next to announce for G.hn although it would more likely be mostly for the coax version of it to replace coax-based HPNA, which it currently uses. That would be yet another loss for the MoCA crowd although they would not lose any of their current deployment partners, which are Verizon and the world’s leading cablecos and satcos ‘ a very large and growing marketplace.
As we have reported frequently, Sigma Designs, the sole producer of HPNA chips, has repeatedly said it will make a single chipset that is both G.hn and HPNA, which means telcos like AT&T could then purchase, stock, ship and deploy one box which automatically connects to existing HPNA networks but which could re-configure to G.hn where there is no HPNA.
The next big battle will be for makers of CE devices. The question is who will succeed in convincing CE makers to build it into their chips. HomePlug has a jump in that market because Hisense is doing exactly that by embedding Qualcomm Atheros HomePlug chips in some smart TVs it is shipping in China, but not yet in North America or Europe. Other CE devices with HomePlug built-in are a music extender from Netgear that streams digital audio to a stereo/surround sound system, a media player from France-based Lea that takes in video from various sources and uses an HDMI cable to streams it to a TV set and a D-Link Wi-Fi router with built-in HomePlug.
Both Qualcomm Atheros and Broadcom, the other major chipmaker with HomePlug, also have the latest Wi-Fi technology, 11ac, which they could provide for embedding in CE devices together with HomePlug. Only Marvell of the G.hn chipmakers has its own Wi-Fi technology although Sigma Designs could be expected to partner with a Wi-Fi chipmaker.
China Telecom said that it would now push hard on getting G.hn into the market. It said it is going full-steam ahead and wants to pick up the pace.