http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385472,00.asp
HomeGrid's Powerline/Coax Standard Moves Closer to Reality
The HomeGrid Forum plans to host a "plugfest" next week, testing the interoperability of networking products that use the upcoming, awkwardly-named G.hn wired home networking standard before a launch later this year.Final products will likely carry a HomeGrid logo, Chano Gomez, HomeGrid's marketing working group co-chair and director of business development at Lantiq, said in an interview.
Although marketed by the HomeGrid Forum, the G.hn standard is administered by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as a way to send signals at up to a gigabit per second across coaxial cable, telephone cords, and home powerlines at up to gigabit speeds. As such, it competes with DS2's UPA standard and HomePlug; the latter has carved out an established position, but is incompatible with HomeGrid G.hn devices.
In 2010, the IEEE gave the green light for the development of P1905.1, a standard which would unify Wi-Fi, Ethernet, MoCA, and the IEEE 1901 Broadband over Powerline (BPL) technology.
As such, it's up to companies like gateway providers and device makers to sign on and actually incorporate one technology or another to determine a market winner. As an example, Gomez cited AT&T, which could put the technology inside its U-Verse set-top boxes alongside wi-Fi and other interfaces. "Many of these vendors have products underway, and are waiting on [the] compatibility [testing] to bring them to market," Gomez said.
The G.hn products will also probably be certified by Underwriters Laboratories, the independent testing facility, Gomez added.
The plugfest event will take place from May 23-27, 2011 and will be hosted at the ITU facilities in Geneva, Switzerland, HomeGrid said. It's a joint effort by the HomeGrid Forum and the Broadband Forum, and is being facilitated by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL).
