DVD chip maker Sigma this week moved to grab ownership of the burgeoning G.hn market by getting to market first. It has launched a chip that works with existing coax, phone lines and power lines to deliver gigabyte class home networks, with no new wires.
Sigma hopes to leverage its investment in HPNA chip designer Coppergate, to gain an overnight lead in the ‘no new wires’ market, and give HPNA customers a clear and immediate upgrade path.
A rival chip is sure to emerge like a Phoenix from the ashes of DS2, the Spanish chip designer which kept powerline networking alive in Europe, almost single-handedly, until it ran out of cash and got snapped up by Marvell. DS2 along with Coppergate, was thought to be the other main contributor to the G.hn standard.
Marvell Technology has proved that it knows how to turn a half -finished technology around, and purchased the first generation Intel mobile chip business and which has been growing recently at 40% and finally broken into healthy profitability.
The market for the two main ‘No New Wires’ rivals, both of which point to customer self-installed home networks and all the money that will save for operators, is expected to reach some 200 million chips and reach 110 million homes by 2015, according to a recent report from US researcher IMS. We think IMS has under, rather than over, estimated this market.
Marvell will make a worthy competitor for Sigma, which is why it was important to have reached the market first. Marvell had a recent quarter at around $900 million, with $220 million net income and has $2.3 billion in the bank. It can certainly afford to invest in a new area of technology outside cellular and general networking chips.
The new Sigma Designs chip is called the CG5110, adhering to the ITU next-generation standard for wired home entertainment networks over any wire. We would think that it will turn up in devices fairly rapidly, delivered in samples in Q1 2011, with products likely to show in third quarter and in the market by perhaps last quarter 2011, as long as the chip works to spec first time.
Sigma says this new chipset will lead to systems that can run up to 3Gbps. That’s a bit disingenuous and based on each of them handling something close to 1Gbps. So actually it’s a 1Gbps network with three hops. And then if you examine this further the real world data rate of the HomePlug AV part of the equation is more like 600 Mbps. But even if we call this a single 600 Mbps network, it’s a three times improvement over what you can buy today at rival MoCA or at HPNA. Sigma prefers to call it a nine times improvement over existing wire solutions and stick to that 3Gbps idea.
We have had our doubts about G.hn making it into the light of day, and expressed them in these pages, but the throughput advantages, if they come smoothly to market could last for the next 5 years comfortably, and perhaps longer, as wireless Gigabyte class systems are perfected such as WiGig and WirelessHD. Sigma sees these home networks carrying IPTV, telepresence, telemedicine, home monitoring and 3DTV.
It’s no big surprise, which is not built into the G.hn standard, is the fact that the Sigma CG5110 supports backward compatibility with power and HPNA, which speaks well to the existing deployments of HomePNA and HomePlug AV. Sigma reckons that 80% of all IPTV deployments in the world are based on these standards, though the overlap in whole home DVR and MoCA is clearly being distorted inside those figures and we don’t quite see it being anything like as dominant as that ‘ MoCA would probably claim 80% dominance too.
We know that Sigma has made a great play of adding MIMO to its HomePlug system, introducing MIMO over powerline at IBC and calling it ClearPath Extreme. The demonstration was only at around 90 Mbps at IBC. But MIMO is part and parcel of the standard and we don’t think Sigma will remain out on its own in this respect for too long, so it had better make hay while the sun shines. The chip is built in 40 nm geometry for low power says Sigma.
“I am delighted to see the G.hn standard is becoming a reality and companies in the industry are starting to build solutions based around the G.9960 and G.9961 G.hn standard,” said Tom Starr, ITU-T Working Party 1/15 Chairman.
The CG5110 chip complies with the ITUs G.9960/1; G.9954; HomePlug AV Version 1.1also called IEEE P1901; G.9972 and is a Plug & Play system with auto configuration and self-install over all three media, the company says. It will use dynamic topology detection and mesh routing as well as being rate adaptive to accommodate any network noise.
The chip can coexist with bonded VDSL2 and DSL2,VDSL, ADSL2+, ADSL2, ADSL and cope with ISDN, POTs and terrestrial and satellite TV protocols and samples will be available to customers in Q1 2011.
On the rival networking front MoCA followers plan to combine a MoCA 2 chip with Homeplug AV2, also using MIMO late this year using a new transmission coding scheme and a more efficient MAC. It should be roughly the equivalent of G.hn in terms of performance and but only time will tell if the chip will get to market on time, and achieve the same economies of scale that the HPNA chips claim.
Other G.hn market entries are expected from start-ups Ikanos, Lantiq and Xingtera, all specialist chip designers in the area saying they will make G.hn chips and of course at some stage the heavy mob of Atheros and Broadcom say this will have a place on their future roadmaps, but with no timescale given. Atheros last year acquired Intellon, the leading Homeplug chip maker so has a big vested interest here.
Both MoCA and HPNA have begun ramping existing installations into the millions and may have longer lives than anyone anticipated, something underscored by Broadcom’s statement of intent in the MoCA arena (it has said it will launch a chip but there are no design wins there yet).
These two opposing technologies have dominance at Verizon (MoCA with 3.3 million customers) and AT&T (HPNA with 2.7 million) making up 6 million installs over the past 3 to 4 years in the US alone. This is without counting the fact that Comcast and DirecTV, and other pay TV operators are using MoCA plus DLNA for multi-room DVRs.
The fact that DLNA has not yet embraced HPNA or G.hn as part of its standards stack speaks heavily in favor of MoCA, although it may also serve to marginalize DLNA outside of the US, unless it fixes that position soon.
In the end we would expect these two technologies to fight it out for what eventually will be 750 million pay TV homes around the world. And key decisions in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will probably decide which of these two technologies ultimately prevails, although knowing China, it will invent its own and further fragment the market.
The two main chip makers behind MoCA and Homeplug, Entropic and Intellon announced a year ago that they are working together on home networking solutions combining coax and Powerline. Clearly this is NOT G.hn and the timing of its arrival and acceptance among its existing operators will be critical in deciding if MoCA has a follow on future.
However the fact that Homeplug has never before had enough momentum to attract rivals to Intellon in the past, means that it faces genuine competition for the first time. Back in May this year however, the new owner of Intellon, Wi-Fi giant Atheros, announced that it was also combing Wi-Fi with the Intellon powerline systems and in the process, try to create a de facto standard.
On acquiring Intellon last September, Atheros CEO Craig Barratt said the Wi-Fi/powerline combination, plus Ethernet, could take the role of ‘the backbone of the home network.’