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Power-line rogues regroup under CEA

By Toni Kistner
Net.Worker, 06/18/01

Though the players politely deny it, there's a standards battle brewing in the AC power-line network industry. Back last year when the HomePlug consortium chose Intellon's 11M bit/sec technology as the basis of its specification, that left a handful of companies - Inari, Enikia, nSine, Adaptive Networks and others - out in the cold. While all but Inari have since joined HomePlug, most have also regrouped under the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) to create a second, potentially competing, specification.

The CEA's R7.3 calls for an ANSI-certified standard that delivers 1M bit/sec throughput, much slower than HomePlug's. Mike Stelts, the group's chairman and manager of standards coordination with Thomson Multimedia (which is developing power-line carrier (PLC) products with Inari), says the group hopes to present a completed standard in early 2002. Right now, Stelts is hammering out details that will result in a technology bakeoff that's expected to take place in late summer or early fall timeframe.

Nascent technologies are tricky business. AC power-line networking, also known as PLC, has enormous market potential. In the coming years, we're likely to not only use PLC to network PCs over existing residential power-line infrastructure, but also to network anything and everything that's electrically powered: white goods (refrigerators and dishwashers), consumer electronics equipment (stereos, TVs), and home automation, control and security systems.

What's tricky is that these various devices will have varying throughput requirements; some won't need more than a few 100 kps. So the big question is whether the 11M bit/sec HomePlug standard is appropriate for them all. The CEA argues that HomePlug's speed makes it too expensive to use for slower applications such as home control and security, and that R7.3 will serve that market perfectly.

In contrast, HomePlug is urging vendors that want to target the lower speed market to use the HomePlug spec as a basis for building HomePlug-compliant products. However, it's too early to say whether this strategy will be cost effective, or the best way to go in the short term. It could make sense for vendors to wait six months for CEA R7.3. Then again, they could be using this time to retool HomePlug to build low-speed compliant products.

In a perfect world, all vendors would have fallen in behind HomePlug. Instead, many grumbled, denounced the selection process and continued working on their proprietary technologies. Elliott Newcombe, Intellon director of product marketing, says HomePlug chose Intellon's technology because applications that will drive the market will require faster speeds, and urges losing companies to "redirect their development to work on compliant chips rather than pursue a proprietary standard." But in the rogues' defense, HomePlug doesn't seem too interested in pursuing the lower speed market.

Another sticking point is ANSI certification. The CEA is making a big deal about it, while HomePlug says what's really important is getting products into the marketplace. And while Stelts insists the CEA group is not a rival to HomePlug and encourages an open dialog between the groups, its rhetoric smacks of sour grapes. Stelts states the ANSI certification process "ensures that any and all views can be heard in an open forum, and that decisions are not only technically sound, but free from bias."