MULTIMEDIA OVER COAX TRIALS HEAT HOME BANDWIDTH BATTLE

Last week's National Cable TV Association show was heavy on the technologies that will allow cable operators to launch offensive strikes into the heart of telco turf. But in an interesting sideshow to the proceedings, a battle was heating up over one key technology that will help telcos move into video.

On the first day of the show, The Multimedia Over Coax Alliance (MoCA) announced it had finished a series of successful field trials that proved its technology can consistently deliver 100 Mb/s of usable Ethernet data throughput over existing in-home coaxial cable.

The trial, conducted in the homes of employees of eight cable and satellite operators that are part of the alliance, was meant to prove that Ethernet-to-coax adapters could work under real-world conditions. During the trials, each company received kits that included four MoCA nodes and two laptops. Volunteers — mostly in non-technical fields — brought the kits home and hooked up the nodes to existing cable outlets. Laptops then sent data streams across the nodes.

“It gathered up quality of service parameters, but by far the most important thing it measured was data throughput,” said Ladd Wardani, president of MoCA. “The key requirement was that we wanted to see 100 Mb of net, usable data rate between outlets.”

MoCA, which includes Entropic, Comcast, Motorola and EchoStar among others, initially was targeting just cable operators but is now getting interest from telcos looking for technologies to transmit IP video from the side of the house to various TV locations, Wardani said.

For the purposes of the trials, the companies used Ethernet-to-coax bridges, but the technology can be integrated in residential gateways and set-top boxes, he added.

Early telco IP video deployments have relied on carriers rewiring homes with Ethernet cabling or using Coaxsys' technology. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company, which has signed licensing agreements with several traditional telco access vendors, last week launched its first cable- and satellite-compatible product. The TVnet/C and TVnet/S products allow cable and satellite operators to combine data rates of 100 Mb/s with integrated QOS while maintaining compatibility with legacy video delivery.

In the telco video world, the company's IPTV 7000 product runs at up to 104 Mb/s under ideal conditions.

“If we want to cheat and puff our chests out, we can say that, but 70 Mb/s is the nominal rate,” said Ted Archer, director of marketing for Coaxsys. “We can deliver a telco product that delivers far more, but there isn't really much demand for it right now. There will be that demand because bandwidth is obviously something that everyone is pushing. At this point, given what they're offering, there's just not the need.”

Part of the reason is most U.S. carriers that provide video over their existing copper infrastructure are delivering it to the home at 24 Mb/s. As more fiber-to-the-premises networks are deployed — and VDSL2 technology hits the market — that will change.

“[Telcos] talk in terms of video streams,” Archer said. “The telcos want to know how many HD streams and standard streams they can deliver.”

Archer also points out that while MoCA portrays itself as a coalition, Entropic is the only vendor providing the technology.

“They've done a great job in marketing,” he said. “But that has helped us to a considerable extent. MoCA/Entropic has created a demand in the market, and we stepped in with a working product.”

Neither vendor, though, is looking at opening up their technology to the standards process as other home networking groups have done (see figure).

“It's possible we may do that in the future, but we don't have any specific plans,” Wardani said.

Inside story: Typical transfer rates for various in-home technologies

MoCA	Usable bandwidth of 100 Mb/s
Coaxsys	Nominal rate 70 Mb/s for telco product; 100 Mb/s for cable product
HomePlug AV	MAC layer support for more than 100 Mb/s
Home PNA	240 Mb/s (with extensions on HPNA 3.0)
802.11n	(in standards development) 100 Mb/s or more