An important trend in service provider WiFi is for operators to offer multiple access points per home, rather than a single, ever-bigger AP. This was highlighted a few weeks ago by the launch of the Sky Q set-top box, and the same pattern is seen in an announcement by US RF specialist MaxLinear and Israeli WiFi chip supplier Celeno.
The pair have announced a reference platform which combines MoCA 2.0 (Multimedia over coax) silicon with 4×4 MIMO WiFi, to make a robust home network. This reflects another emerging trend in home networking – for MoCA to be used to backhaul WiFi. The design uses Celeno’s Quicksilver CL2440 802.11ac Wave 2 4×4 Multi User MIMO WiFi chip and MaxLinear’s low power EN2810 MoCA 2.0 system-on-chip.
The platform also features Celeno’s ControlAIR software, which promises easy set-up, consumer control features and client steering. The last of these is a mesh network which tells a client device which AP it should connect to, for the health of the network, and helps the AP select the most appropriate WiFi channel, dynamically sniffing those available.
Set-top box provider AirTies has done something similar in Europe using HomePlug AV2 as the fallback backhaul, but Celeno, with its eyes on the US and other markets, where coaxial cable is more likely to be present, has now done the same with MoCA. It is not yet clear whether it is offering an extender technology or a true mesh, or whether the devices default to 5 GHz or MoCA as the backhaul. But the overall direction is clear, and a threat to the alternative route – towards more powerful 8×8 MIMO monsters, as suggested by pay-TV WiFi market leader Quantenna.
The Celeno approach should lead to a dramatic fall-off in what are called bad apple problems, when a single device hogs all the network bandwidth, and could be used to protect 4K WiFi streams moving throughout the home.
Sky Q was the first set-top where the DTH signal was sent through WiFi to other devices in the home, rather than smartphones and tablets reaching out over the open internet for the same content. This reference design is likely to offer the same capability but in MoCA-connected regions.
There is even a coexistence standard IEEE 1905.1, to move data between MoCA and WiFi, but the AirTies systems did not use this because it has insufficient data routes to allow each AP to know enough about the entire network.
“The proliferation of mobile devices, tablets, over-the-top Ultra-HD video, and IoT will only increase the burden placed on a subscriber’s home network. Service providers need solutions today that reliably distribute high levels of broadband service over the MoCA backbone and can address WiFi throughput and coverage issues,” said Will Torgerson, general manager of MaxLinear’s Broadband Group, in a statement.