SMB Networks / Home Networks /

Send in the rogues

By Toni Kistner
Net.Worker, 05/14/01

Despite the industry's best efforts to instill order, proprietary home-network technologies keep cropping up. Standards bodies such as HomePNA, HomeRF, Wi-Fi and HomePlug are formed to quicken time to market of competitively priced and interoperable products - without squabbling over competing standards. Trouble is, protecting the interests of one standard can prevent faster or less-expensive technologies from gaining a foothold.

Take HomePNA, the poster child for vendor cooperation. Despite its legendary quick time to market and competitive prices, the home phone-line market is floundering. And Version 3.0, which promises 32M bit/sec speeds, is nowhere in sight.

Part of the problem has been education, says Patrick Lo, CEO of Netgear, manufacturer of small-office network products for a variety of technologies. Early on, HomePNA refused to spend money on marketing and education, instead expecting the vendors to foot the bill, Lo says. But no one wanted to spend money on an effort that would benefit competitors, so product remained on the shelves misunderstood. My guess is that consumers find it intimidating enough to deal with DSL running over their phone lines, let alone a LAN on top of that.

HomePNA's challenger is an Israeli company called SerCoNet, which says it will begin beta testing its 100M bit/sec home phone-line products by year-end, and will ship product by mid-2002. To achieve such speeds, the technology requires that you replace your existing telephone outlets with SerCoNet's souped-up ones, which support a host of interfaces: 10/100 Ethernet, Universal Serial Bus, IEEE 1394, HomeRF, Bluetooth, and HiperLAN. SerCoNet's home systems will include four outlets and a power supply for about $200 for the 10M bit/sec version (due out by year-end), and less than $400 for the 100M bit/sec version, the company says.

Nir Cohen, SerCoNet's business development director, recently returned from a HomePNA meeting in which he tried unsuccessfully to convince the group to adopt his company's technology. Cohen says the group expressed concern that SerCoNet's technology wouldn't be backward compatible with earlier versions of Home-PNA and, perhaps more importantly, that its adoption would prevent the group from getting its return on investment.

Even so, Cohen insists his company is a partner to all standards bodies, not a rival. "We hope to help them increase performance. We have the ability to become the backbone upon which other technologies - wireless and power line - run," he says.

HomePlug has hit a few land mines, too. While the standards body charged with bringing power line network products to market got off to a strong start with the selection of Intellon's technology, industry sources say it's now mired in politics and falling behind schedule.

HomePlug's challenger is nSine, a U.K. silicon manu-facturer. Its nPlug technology costs about one-third less than HomePlug-based chips, making it attractive and cost effective for embedding into everything from PCs to refrigerators to stereos.

Vice president of business development Roy MacKenzie says, "PC makers won't embed the products if they aren't cheaper. HomePlug is condemned to being a retrofit product for the short and medium term."

"Our relationship with HomePlug is a complicated one," MacKenzie adds. "We're behind the marketing initiative. But we're not behind the selection of the first-generation technology. We don't think it met the market requirements."

Ironically, nSine didn't set out to compete with HomePlug; the companies' timelines simply converged. When HomePlug was evaluating technologies, nSine wasn't yet ready. Now that HomePlug is behind schedule, it looks like nSine and HomePlug will introduce competing, first-generation chips by the fall.