MoCA said this week that it has ratified its next-generation specification, MoCA 2.0. MoCA is in a technology race against HPNA and its successor G.hn, and wants to introduce new capabilities to keep its market lead in digital home, video coax connections.
It may be no coincidence that during the same week G.hn has finally come out with an agreed MAC layer and has added a handful of new members committed to either making or using G.hn silicon (see separate story in this issue).
The new MoCA 2.0 will offer two performance modes, Basic and Enhanced, at 400 Mbps and 800 Mbps net throughput, based on 700 Mbps and 1.4 Gbps PHY rates, respectively. MoCA says that for applications in two node networks (i.e. a single set top and a single TV) the Basic mode can be upped to 500 Mbps and Enhanced mode to 1 Gbps. The spec also expands the frequency range it operates in.
The improvements are achieved by expanding the operating channels to 100 MHz from the current 50 MHz and the use of channel bonding to use more than one channel at once. MoCA says that the packet error rate has been improved to one packet error in 100 million and that packet latency is now less than 3.5 milliseconds across all packets, in all traffic profiles.
MoCA 2.0 will operate in the frequency range between 500 MHz and 1650 MHz on the coaxial cable, instead of from 850 to 1525 MHz as MoCA 1.1 used to.
What is most important is that the spec is backward compatible to MoCA 1.1, so existing MoCA operators can leave their connectors in situ and protect their investment in set tops. This is a big selling point for MoCA ‘ over all the new technologies ‘ operators that have installed MoCA can mix and match the two generations of the technology and upgrade devices at their usual speed. MoCA was originally used to make IPTV connections, but increasingly it is used across a wide range of Pay TV technologies including cable and satellite services, to provide the connectivity for the current generation of whole room DVRs.
Without this backward compatibility G.hn would be sure to win the war for in-home wired video connectors, because it ability to use power circuits to distribute video signals around a home, with no new wiring. G.hn can also connect with coax and twisted pair, but will need new chips inside set tops and TV sets, so will only get deployed at the same speed that devices are upgraded by operators and also relies on convincing CE manufacturers to include its chips.
‘Performance becomes ever more critical as service providers add higher-bandwidth applications to their service offerings,’ said Dr. Anton Monk, VP of Technology at Entropic Communications and MoCA CTO. ‘MoCA 2.0 will feature unrivalled performance and reliability and MoCA continues to be the networking technology of choice for today’s and tomorrow’s home entertainment network.’
We would expect MoCA 2.0 chips to come first from Entropic, which has shipped 30 million MoCA chips and which at one stage was the only source for MoCA chips and it says that they should sample in the second half of 2011 and ramp to volume in early 2012.