Comcast moving ahead on home networking with Philadelphia trial

Comcast is taking home networking out of the laboratory and putting it into Philadelphia homes with a technology trial with Broadcom and Ucentric Systems. Comcast employees and so-called friendly subscribers will be testing a cable television in-home coax infrastructure using home phone line networking alliance (HPNA) technology.

“We’re taking the physical layer of the 19 megabits that HPNA over coax can handle and running it to test the physical aspects of the network,” said Michael Collette, Ucentric’s CEO. “It’s just checking it to make sure that the network itself works and doesn’t cause an interactions we don’t like.”

It is not, “a big field trial, per se,” said Collette. “We’re focused on validating a physical layer and a software layer for networking applications around the home. We’re just going to be pushing the data around, verifying bit rates.”

The trial, he said, has no determined length.

While Comcast and its partners will be pushing data around the homes, Collette said that the HPNA technology can, and will, push video as well.

“We believe we can comfortably carry four simultaneous broadcast-quality MPEG-2 streams in the home over this network,” he said.

That, he said, coincides with Ucentric’s multi-TV/personal video recording application that removes the need to buy multiple PVRs for different in-home locations, which will also be part of the trial.

“At the end of the day, the video’s just data, too,” he said.