Motive, Intellon team on HomePlug management

AUSTIN, Texas--Intellon and Motive have teamed up to enable Home-Plug networks to be remotely managed by service providers, the two companies announced today.

Intellon's HomePlug-compliant integrated circuits will now integrate with Motive's broadband management software, so that service providers who deploy the Motive system will be able to give customer service reps visibility into the home network to diagnose problems that crop up and interfere with service.

"Our main objective is to make the customer experience simple and reliable and that is Motive's main objective as well, so this helps both of us," said Cameron McCaskill, vice president of business development for Intellon, in an interview at Motivation, Motive's customer conference being held here this week.

Motive's Home Device Manager, a server that sits in the network and interacts with client software, is intended to let service providers more easily diagnose customer problems that may occur in a premises device, such as a residential gateway, and interfere with service.

"Service providers need to be able to manage beyond the residential gateway to the specific device because the problem may manifest itself in one service but be caused by a problem in another device," said Kenny Van Zant, executive vice president of marketing for Motive.

HomePlug, which uses existing home power lines for the inside wiring to deliver broadband services within the home, is one of the available home network solutions, and making it more manageable will help encourage its deployment, McCaskill said.

The integration with Motive software will enable customers to self-install IPTV and home network services over their powerlines using HomePlug.

According to Intellon, more than a dozen service providers in Europe and North America are using its HomePlug solutions in volume deployments, including Bell Canada, and it has additional field trials underway in those areas and in Asia.