HomePlug favors new IEEE powerline draft standard

An IEEE draft standard for powerline communications was approved last week at the P1901 Working Group meeting in Tokyo, Japan, and the HomePlug Powerline Alliance said today that its HomePlug AV technology is a key element of that draft standard. HomePlug is an approach to in-home networking that uses the existing powerlines as opposed to Ethernet cabling, phone lines or existing coaxial cable.

“There will be a continuing amount of work, but the draft represents a pretty robust, stable document, and people tend to start moving forward based on that,” said Rob Ranck, president of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance. “People will look at this as a green light to start their development of products.”

Ranck characterized the new draft standard as “really HomePlug AV plus some additional features,” and said silicon makers have already announced plans to do P1901 chips. “We would expect they would tweak their HomePlug AV chips and come out with the first 1901 silicon,” Ranck said.

The additional features includes a signaling mechanism that enables the P1901 standard to include both the HomePlug AV approach to powerline and the competing Panasonic Wavelet technology that has been widely adopted in Japan, Ranck said.

“The draft standard enables the two approaches to co-exist – they don’t interoperate,” Ranck said. “We had two modes here; now the market is going to decide which to use. It’s basically like what happened with [802.11] wireless A and G – what happened over time was that the market chose G.”