Marvell recycles old G.hn press releases

Marvell, via The Online Report, "this week announced two G.hn wins with equipment makers — one in Spain ... and the other in South Korea"'

Unfortunately, it is not true that it is this week's news. Both were announced at CES 2014 in early January.

 01/07/2014: Marvell G.hn-Certified Chipset Powers Netwave's Home Connectivity Solutions

01/08/2014: Blu-Castle Selects Marvell's Award-Winning G.hn Silicon to Power Connectivity in the Home

Desperate is as desperate does.

tl;dr Or maybe The Online Report misunderstood Marvell's g.hn spin.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Homegrid's spinning blog post

Homegird's recent post, An Independent Point of View: Shedding New Light on G.hn Capabilities, implies that Comcast is recommending G.hn. They do this by referencing the sponsored post, "The impact of mobile: Is your network ready for the wireless working revolution?".

From the Homegrid's post:

"Comcast presented G.hn as a simple and easy-to-use solution that provides cutting-edge home networking over any wire in the home. "

The only problem is that Comcast never presented anything of the like in the sponsored post. The post was 100% the handy work of ITProPortal's contribute James Morris.

The only involvement of Comcast was that its business to business subsidiary, Comcast Business, paid good money to have a big fast advertisement stuck in the middle of post.

To be fair, Homegrid's post did mention, two times, that the sponsored post was paid for by Comcast Business. I guess Homegrid's editors forgot this when they decided to put a G.hn spin on the original sponsored post.

tl;dr Or, to be charitable, maybe Homegrid does not understand that a sponsored post is just a paid advertisement in a post.

HomeGrid's System Product Certification -- one hand clapping?

Back in September 2013 HomeGrid issued a press release announcing announcing that a COMTREND's adapter passed HomeGrid's System Product Certification. I was thinking that after three years of promises the big boy G.hn has arrived !

But then I got a thinking a bit more...how in the hell do you pass Interoperability Certification with only one vendor? COMTREND doing interoperability tests with COMTREND is not interoperability testing.

HomeGrid has the classic producct certification program architecture. First chips have to pass Compliance testing to show the implement the standard. These are black box measurements from the outside in and only imply one chip vendor. HomeGrid has two vendors who have passed these tests: Marvell and Sigma Designs. But these tests do not show that G.hn chips from Marvell and Sigma Designs interoperate: i.e. can talk to each other.

The second round of testing is Interoperability testing. That is interoperability is between two different chip vendors (note that some alliances cheat on this (like HPNA and ZigBee) and only have one chip vendor--but at least they decently have two products for interop).

From HomeGrid's website:

" The Product Certification test program is designed to verify that a commercially available product containing both HomeGrid Certified G.hn silicon and production software/firmware complies with the HomeGrid requirements regarding interoperability..."

COMTREND's adapter passing HomeGrid's interoperability certification tests all by itself, a is ridiculous claim on its face. Its been 9 months since Sigma Designs was the 2nd chip to pass HomeGrid's Compliance tests, so why no interoperability?

G.hn fails. Marvell repurposes their G.hn for Access Networking solutions--winning

The Online Reporter's article on Marvell repurposing their G.hn chip for Access networks solutions is a wonderful infocommerical. The lovely Chano Gomez smartly explains all. He says G.fast is too fucking late to compete with DOCSIS version 99.99, but G.hn on twisted-pair wires is ready to today! And kills VSDL2+. on price and performance. Marvell calls this Access technology G.now-a great play on the eternally late G.fast.

G.now's "sweet spot is closer to 100 meters to 200 meters.”, says Chano--which about 50 meters less the the unicorn technology, G.fast.Chano goes on to say, "about 50% of the cost of taking fiber right to the home, is the last 50 meters, as you come into the property, dig up and fix the garden, and require scheduled visits and user permissions.". Nice argument, except G.fast gets the same 50% cost savings.

Chano also positions G.now over coax to compete with EOC, DOCSIS and MOCA for Access networks in MDUs--hello China, and goodbye G.hn on powerline.