Now there are two IEEE 1901 chips

It was no surprise when Atheros announced at CES their new AR7400 fourth-generation powerline chipset and that it was IEEE 1901 compliant.

Today Gigle surprised everybody with the announcement that Gigle's currently shipping chips can be made IEEE 1901 compliant by a "simple firmware upgrade".

Before this announcement, Atheros was clearly in the lead for bring IEEE 1901 devices to market. Not any more.

Wonder when the G,hn vendors will have any chips. Looks that they are at least a year behind IEEE 1901, so wait for CES2011.

And then there was 3--HomePlug AV gets a 3rd vendor of silicon

After the HomePlug AV market leader, Atheros (ex-Intellon), and the second HomePlug AV chip maker, Gigle, we now have SPIDCOM getting into the act with this press release for their HomePlug AV Pass-Through Reference Design. SPIDCOM seems to be going for the applications market with SoC/Linux on a HomePlug AV chip.

It will be great to see tests with all three chips together.

HomePlugAV/IEEE 1901 and IEEE 802.11n a perfect marriage

The pre-CeBIT press releases are arriving. Aztech and devolo are both marrying HomePlug AV (aka pre-IEEE 1901) with IEEE 802.11n wireless.

Aztech's press release just says they have a "Wireless-N Extender for its HomePlug powerline range of network accessories".

devolo's press release not only mentions their 802.11n/HomePlug AV product, but it also pushes their 500Mbps HomePlug AV/IEEE 1901 turbo product.

The ecosystem for HomePlug AV/IEEE 1901 products is getting wider and wider.

Hot or not Hot

On the front page of Gigle.biz (way better than their new and way too long giglenetworks.com)  news section Gigle is trumpeting the fact that EDN Europe thinks they are HOT.. Congratulations, but..

In the semiconductor business, being hot, at least on a chip, is not a good thing.

Intellon had issues with their INT6000 running hot, but their INT6400 is definitively not hot--which is hot--they win a prize to from EDN Europe.

Hot, not hot, everybody wins.

Poor Engineering Beats Poor Marketing Everytime

This DS2 video from two years about says it all about Intellon and DS2.

• DS2, great market communications, and stupid marketing.
•  Intellon, lazy engineering, but good marketing

The video is 100% correct in that Intellon's HomePlug AV chips do  not interoperate with their old HomePlug +Turbo 85Mbps chips. People hated that, but the market for HomePlug AV is so much larger Intellon got away with it.

DS2 had a 45Mbps chip which was only used (tested) for Access applications and never Inhome. After it went nowhere fast, DS2 introduced there 200Mbps chip. It did OK, got NetGear DS2 was 6 months aheard of Intellons 200Mbps HomePlug AV chip.

So, where does DS2's 100Mbps chip come in. The marketing giants of DS2 saw an opportunity in the incompatiable within Intellon's older 85Mbps and there newer 200Mbps chips. So DS2 marketing decides introduced a slower 100Mbps chip which can interoperate with the 200Mbps chips.

To say the least, DS2 did not ship many (any?) of the the 100Mbps chip. But it makes great market comm videos.

AR7400 (ex-INT7400) 1Gbps PHY Rate says Monster

Monster cable has a CES press release claiming that the AR7400 chip, previously known as the INT7400, has a 1Gbps PHY rate. This is a bit suspect as the Atheros product page still does not list the AR7400. 

Fact checking Monster's CES press release shows a major lie saying AR7400 is the "world's fastest PowerLine Communication (PLC) product" and is "5X faster than all other PLC products currently on the market". Gigle's GGL541 has been on the market for over six months. 

Any case, it is great to see the competition in the HomePlug AV (aka IEEE 1901) market heating up and giving us all more and better chips to choose from.

Entropic & Atheros (ex-Intellon) demo MoCA/HomePlug coexistence

According to Entropic's latest press release, Entropic & Atheros (ex-Intellon) demo MoCA/HomePlug coexistence. They also give a jab at ITU's G.hn saying "there is no need to produce a completely new standard that does not provide backward interoperability with these existing market leading solutions".

DEMO: Interoperability with HomePlug(TM)
Entropic and Atheros will be demonstrating the ease at which two technologies can coexist together to distribute multimedia to any room of the home. This marks a joint collaboration between two leading home networking companies to show that Entropic's MoCA offerings and Intellon's HomePlug solutions are already able to adequately serve the needs of operators and consumers for delivering multimedia content. Standardization of next-generation technologies is underway and there is no need to produce a completely new standard that does not provide backward interoperability with these existing market leading solutions.