CES plays home to HomePlug at 100 Mbps

Empowerment lobby

The Consumer Electronics show would not be complete without the HomePlug Powerline Alliance making a show of its technology for networking up the home using existing power cables.

And HomePlug systems were on show both delivering in the new standard at 14 megabits per second (mbps), and a new advanced version from Intellon, offering a 200 Mbps signal with an aggregate throughput of 100 Mbps.

Clearly the biggest problem to overcome around the home is to get content into the home, and for that power isn’t the answer. But broadcast and cable TV, recorded onto a DVR for instance, can mean that different rooms in the house require digital re-transmission of already captured programs or DVD signals.

This autumn version 1.0 of the Homeplug AV standard was put into concrete and at the CES it was on show linking up a home office, living room and bedroom with a variety of products from the contributing technology suppliers.

At its heart is the Panasonic's powerline AV communications technology, along with Intellon's
powerline home networking technology and DS2's powerline access technology.

The baseline technology includes quality of service and AV management provided by Sharp, while Conexant has contributed its advanced signal processing capabilities to improve overall system performance and robustness.

This combination of technologies was run over a 500 home trial with 100% success rate prior to the standard being set. Intellon also used the show to introduce its PowerAV technology streaming three simultaneous video streams, including a High Definition stream, over standard electrical power wiring.

PowerAV achieves physical layer rates in excess of 200Mbps and actual data rates of more than 100Mbps – faster than any flavor of Wi-Fi – the technology that it believes it is up against for distributing content around a home. However that’s nowhere near as fast as the Ultra WideBand that Intel plans to offer shortly.
PowerAV features quality of service features specific to video and transmits it isochronously.

PowerAV is targeted, among other things to provide multi-room DVR.

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