New HAN standards announced: some relevant and one not so much

The last five days has been HAN Fan heaven with three new HAN standards released.

First to go was HomeGrid's me-to powerline standard (aka G.hn), second was MoCA 2.0 for gigabit speeds on coax, and finally was HomePlug's Green PHY, a profile for the HomePlug AV and IEEE 1901 standards that is intended for home energy management. Not the last two standards interoperate with there respective previous generations. G.hn does not interoperate with any HAN technology on the market (note even HPNA).

Unfortunately, Parks Associates analyst Kurt Scherf thinks not all are equally useful: .

"More standards do make sense in this case," said Parks Associates analyst Kurt Scherf. That's because carriers' implementations of technology are often largely custom-built and proprietary, he said. As a result, the G.hn standard is unlikely to sway many carriers from their chosen paths, he said.  

Scherf, goes on to say that service providers will be "very reluctant to make a wholesale move to a technology that's not proven in large field deployments".

HAN Fan agrees with Scherf, but is wondering if ATT will continue with HPNA 3 or upgrade to HPNA 4 (aka G.hn) given they will not interoperate.