The Powerline home network market consists of three separate and incompatible standards that cannot even operate on the same wires. The situation was confusing to the point that sales of Powerline products never reached their full potential. After all, the only network medium that’s in more rooms than electrical outlets is the air that carries Wi-Fi signals. Efforts to reconcile the three standards have been going on for years with nothing to show until now.
The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) this week said it’s facilitating cooperation between two of the standards: the HomePlug Powerline Alliance and the HD-PLC Alliance. HomePlug was started by chipmaker Intellon, which Atheros now owns. Panasonic leads the HD-PLC brigade, whose chips are used in network gear that is mostly sold in Japan and by AudioVox in small quantities in the States. The third Powerline standard is the DS2-led UPA Powerline, which is not participating in the IEEE coexistence project.
The effort, called IEEE P1901, is not an attempt to make HomePlug and HD-PLC compatible. Its only goal is to allow them to coexist on the same wires. The two groups said IEEE P1901 is seen as one of the critical steps necessary to encourage the production of low-cost Smart Grid-ready home appliances.
A joint certification program for the Inter-System Protocol (ISP) in the IEEE P1901 standard allows for coexistence. Physical devices that are compliant with different versions of the IEEE P1901 standard will be able to operate without interference using the same electrical wires. A plugfest to test interoperability and certify chips is scheduled for May 2010.
Michimasa Aramaki, president of the HD-PLC Alliance, said the “collaborative environment” of the IEEE P1901 standard will expand the home network market for the two Powerline technologies and contribute to accelerated Smart Grid rollout.
Rob Ranck, president of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, said the new standard “will make IEEE P1901 even more robust and useful in the Smart Grid and other applications.”
During the on-again, off-again effort to achieve coexistence, the three companies and others have worked to develop a common technology called G.hn or, as Intel calls it, HomeGrid, which will work over all of the home’s wires; electrical, coax and telephone.
It’s not certain what makes the IEEE 1901 standard so urgent at seemingly this late date except for the lure of the Smart Grid market. It certainly isn’t home networking with Wi-Fi, MoCA and HPNA so strongly entrenched and G.hn threatening to replace all of them in new wireline network installations.