HomePlug earns baseline IEEE approval

The HomePlug Powerline Alliance today announced that its technology proposal was accepted by the IEEE P1901 Working Group as the baseline for an IEEE powerline communications standard. The voting took place last week in Kyoto, Japan, where other proposals for Access and Coexistence standards for powerline technology also were approved.

“That’s exciting for us,” said Rob Ranck, president of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance. “It’s important for us to have specs inside the alliance, but we think it is important to have greater spread and scope, and IEEE brings that.”

An IEEE standard will enable HomePlug Powerline technology to be more rapidly and widely deployed to more consumers, Ranck said. The Coexistence standard was also significant. “It shows the IEEE understands there are multiple powerline technologies and having a platform for coexistence is important, because right now there are conflicting standards.”

The HomePlug Alliance, which Ranck said is the only powerline solution for home networking that has multiple silicon vendors, is expecting additional growth in the near and long term. In the near term, additional silicon vendors are expected to announce their support for the HomePlug Alliance in the first quarter of 2009, while longer term, Ranck is seeing more interest in powerline technology among North American service providers.

To date, HomePlug has found greater acceptance in Europe, where coaxial cable isn’t widely deployed inside homes, Ranck said. In the US, for example, Verizon is using MoCA, a coaxial cable standard, while AT&T is using HPNA, a home phone line approach.

“There are several telecom players that have approached us recently in the context of the next-generation of AV Plus [which will support physical rates potentially up to 1 gigabit per second],” Ranck said. “I can’t talk about names, but they are interested. Many have requirements with very long time horizons. They want to make sure the network in the home has tons of bandwidth.”

Through an alliance with Zigbee, an in-home wireless networking approach, HomePlug also is working with energy companies that want to do in-home control of energy-consuming appliances such as heat and air-conditioning and lighting.