[Swprograms] NY Times on powerline home networking: Everything's Connected, Yes. But How?

[Joel Rubin <jmrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Might I guess if you or your close neighbor uses this form of
networking it will be difficult to DX?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/technology/circuits/14powe.html

April 14, 2005
Everything's Connected, Yes. But How?
By ERIC A. TAUB

Consumer technology seers say they think they have a good idea about
the home of the future. It will be a place where photos, television
shows, movies and music will be stored centrally and available in any
room on demand.

It is called the connected home, where television sets, digital video
recorders, DVD and music players and computers are all tied together.
But an important question must be answered before the connected home
becomes a reality: how will everything actually be connected?

A number of electronics companies and industry groups are working to
answer that question, developing standards for connecting home
entertainment devices.

Consumers who have created a small home computer network know of a few
solutions that at first glance seem like candidates, like Ethernet
cables and wireless.

But while tying together two or three computers to share an Internet
connection and swap the occasional music or photo file is one thing, a
home entertainment network can be another thing entirely. It can
involve many more gadgets: television sets in the family room, kitchen
and bedrooms; cable boxes; satellite TV receivers; DVD and audio
players in the den; amplifiers and speakers scattered throughout the
house; and one or more computers. And multimedia files like
high-definition video or movies can be enormous, requiring lots of
bandwidth.

Running Ethernet wire throughout a house to connect so many devices
can be very expensive, particularly in an older home. And current
versions of home wireless technology are not good contenders for home
entertainment. Signals can be erratic, depending on the time of day,
distance from the router and factors like interference from other home
appliances. Move a wireless television like Sony's LocationFree model
around the house, and watch the picture come and go.

So the ideal solution for the connected home would seem to be to find
some wiring already in the house that digital data could share.
Fortunately, most homes already have electrical wiring and coaxial
cable.

Baby boomers may recall that a home's electrical wiring has been
called into alternative service previously. In the 1970's, various
companies sold devices with such names as the Little Wonder TV
Antenna. Plug it into the wall, and it promised to turn a home's
wiring into "a giant TV antenna," forever ridding the set of ghosts
and snow.

Unlike those novelty items, today's radically different technology
actually works. Companies like NetGear already sell products that
extend wireless signals by transmitting them through electrical wiring
to other rooms. To pick up the signal, users plug a network interface
box into an electrical outlet.

The technology uses a standard called HomePlug 1.0, developed by an
industry group called the HomePlug Powerline Alliance. The group hopes
an advanced version of that standard, HomePlug AV, will become an
industry standard for home-entertainment networks.

Backed by companies like Comcast, EchoStar and RadioShack, the group
is designing its HomePlug AV standard to reliably carry 150 megabits
of data a second over home electrical wiring. A high-definition video
stream uses about 24 megabits a second, so the standard should provide
enough capacity to simultaneously send multiple streams of HD video
from room to room.

Not everyone thinks the HomePlug approach is such a great idea.
Another group of semiconductor and electronics companies, including
D-Link, Motorola, Panasonic and Thomson, wants to use existing coaxial
cable, now used for cable TV, as the network link. Many homes already
have coax going to at least several rooms.

Last week, the Multimedia Over Coax Alliance announced that it had
successfully tested the technology in more than 200 homes, and that it
was able to deliver data at a rate of 100 megabits a second in 95
percent of the wall outlets it tested.

The 5 percent that did not achieve that rate have problems like
deteriorated cable and "are easily fixable," said Ladd Wardani,
president of the group. "In the worst case, we'd just have to run
another coax cable," he said. But if that happened with power lines,
"you'd need an electrician to fix it."

Mr. Wardani also argued that coax cables were not subject to line
interference from other devices, as the technology operates in a
different frequency range.

HomePlug proponents naturally disagree with such conclusions. Various
error-correcting technologies eliminate problems like noise, according
to Oleg Logvinov, president of the group.

Mr. Logvinov said that the coaxial cable approach had problems.
Because many consumers use cable TV splitters, coax will not be easily
suitable for two-way communications, he said.

"The fundamental issue is, what is the convenience factor?" Mr.
Logvinov said. "Where I would place my L.C.D. TV is not necessarily
where I would have a coax outlet."

Consumer electronics companies continue to hedge their bets,
supporting either multiple connectivity approaches or none at all.

Panasonic, a former member of the HomePlug Alliance, has left the
group; together with Sony and Mitsubishi it has created the
CE-Powerline Communications Alliance, which advocates another version
of power line technology. HomePlug's specification does not adequately
address interference issues, according to Paul Liao, Panasonic North
America's chief technology officer.

Yet at the same time, Panasonic is also working with the coaxial cable
group. Its partners Sony and Mitsubishi continue as members of
HomePlug.

And Sharp, while also a member of the HomePlug Alliance, "is in no way
committed to one technology or organization," said Deepak Ayyagari,
principal scientist with Sharp Laboratories.

No matter how ubiquitous coax or electrical outlets may be in a house,
there will always be some place in a room that does not have easy
access to either. All too often, that is just where someone will want
to put a new flat-panel TV.

To tackle such problems, a new short-range, high-data-rate wireless
technology is being developed; proponents of both coax and home wiring
see it as a natural complement to their own hard-wired schemes.

Known as ultrawideband or UWB, this new wireless technology promises
to deliver data at 480 megabits a second at distances up to 30 feet.
While the range is too short for wireless networks, it could be ideal
to provide the last few feet of connectivity needed for TV's and other
consumer electronics devices that need to be placed a few feet away
from an electrical or coax outlet.

"HomePlug and UWB can be a remarkable marriage," Mr. Logvinov said. He
envisions a day when ultrawideband is used to beam a television
program guide to a hand-held organizer, while the shows themselves are
sent via power lines.

Products using these three technologies will begin to appear this year
or in 2006. At first, interface devices will be sold, small units that
plug into an electrical or cable outlet, and then transmit their
signal to a television or other device through an Ethernet cable or
other means.

Only later will chips and other hardware using these standards be
incorporated in products like television sets and DVD players.

The cost may be low enough that all three standards could be
incorporated in a single product, letting the market decide which ones
to adopt.

"There will be a place for all of this stuff," said Mr. Liao of
Panasonic. "You won't need it all, but it will become cheap enough to
get it all."


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