IEEE 1901standard Sponsor Ballot Started

My IEEE birdie is telling me that emails are going out officially starting the sponsor ballot for the IEEE 1901 powerline communication standard--the last step to a standard.

When approved, IEEE 1901 will be the first complete, fully field tested, and multi-vendor powerline communication standard.

While the ITU's G.hn effort has had bits of a standard already approved, their process is to issue incomplete and untested specs and then try to fix them later (see the fixes already for G.hn PHY). Like there xDSL specs, which took years to have interoperable chips, changes to G.hn will be made once chips are field tested.