A marketing death match has gone on for most of the past year among coax supporters, phone line backers and the power line guys, all eager to settle which approach is best. Skirmishes are also flaring up among proprietary approaches that use wireless. Some operators as well as set-top-box system makers are placing small bets on all of them, often joining multiple trade associations. These include the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA); HomePNA, which primarily uses phone lines for networking; and the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, which primarily uses home electrical wiring for networking.

Still, in 2006 it looks like coaxial will take the lead, followed by phone lines and then power lines. Coaxial will be especially important in the United States, where 70 percent of households say they have coax jacks in the living room and 83 percent have them in master bedrooms, according to a Parks Associates study.

Already, companies like Coaxsys Inc. (Los Gatos, Calif.) claim to have widespread interest in coaxial cable. The company says it has 70 deployments at mostly second- and third-tier telcos, including SureWest Communications-a Sacramento, Calif.-based telco known for its triple play. Coaxsys styles itself as an adapter maker, but has developed its own technology, which started at 40 Mbits/second and has evolved over two years to 150 Mbits/s or more. For about nine months, the company has worked with STMicroelectronics NV, a major designer of set-top-box chips, to have its intellectual property implanted in a system-on-chip.

Toward the end of the second quarter, Coaxsys will shift its technology from Xilinx's Spartan 3 platform to an ASIC to drive down costs. "We have actually gone out there and engineered a solution that works and that is cost-effective and is being deployed today," said Adam Powers, Coaxsys' chief technology officer.

Meanwhile, MoCA member companies are moving quickly to get product into the market. Motorola Inc. says it is already shipping set-top boxes based on chips from Entropic Communications Inc., and the MoCA trade group expects the beginnings of two to three major deployments in 2006. "There's going to be a lot of learning by the operators this year as they are starting to deploy stuff, such as what kind of things are people willing to pay for, what interfaces do they like and what applications will they like using, like multiroom DVR," said MoCA marketing chairman Eric Buffkin.

Phone line networking isn't far behind, said Nesin of CopperGate, the main chip maker behind HomePNA. The company has had silicon since 2004, and says that one major operator is deploying it in systems. Nesin said another major deployment will begin in the second half, and then a third at the end of the year. Additionally, at last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), HomePNA added a few extra members to the alliance, including Scientific-Atlanta as a board member.

CopperGate also said that Motorola has stepped up to participate in its latest round of fund-raising, which netted $14.5 million, indicating that HomePNA is gaining momentum with major set-top-box makers.

CopperGate's physical-layer (PHY) rate is 128 Mbits/s. At the application level, it's about 85 Mbits/s. New silicon will roll in the first half of 2006. "We will match the throughput of the other technologies but at a much lower clock speed, so we will be burning less power and it will be a lower-cost solution," Nesin said. "We don't require any expensive [RF] front ends. It's our chip, plus a 40-cent hybrid and a crystal-and that's the entire incremental BOM [bill of materials]."

Coming a little late to the house party, after coax and phone line, is power line networking. Yet, in theory, it has the widest appeal after wireless, due to the ubiquity of sockets in the home. "If we had a magic wand, we'd love for power line to work, work consistently and work at high bandwidths," said Danny Briere, CEO of TeleChoice Inc., a telecom consultancy. "It has the most user-friendly, mass-market, zero-install approach."

But the 85-Mbit/s HomePlug Turbo offerings are just hitting the market, and people are still waiting to see how they will perform in the real world. So far, the main chip maker behind HomePlug, Intellon Corp., is just getting real silicon for the latest HomePlugAV spec, which it showcased at CES last week. The chips get 70 to 120 Mbits/s at the application layer, depending on the interference running along the power line, considered the harshest of the wired mediums.

Panasonic is also likely to roll out advancements in power line technology. The company will use its proprietary approach because of disagreements with the HomePlug group that led to its departure in 2004. It joined a new consortium with Mitsubishi and Sony at last year's CES.

Each of the wired technologies-coax, phone line and power line-has its pluses and minuses, and few believe that one will dominate. Because of this, set-top-box makers like Motorola are taking a tempered approach to the alphabet soup of acronyms, and design their systems with flexibility in mind. "What we really see is that the performance difference between these three approaches is not appreciable," said Ray Sokola, chief technology officer of Motorola's Connected Home Solutions. "We're architecting our products so that there is not really a cost disadvantage by utilizing these three. We try to do it in a separated plug-in card so it's pretty simple to move from one to the other without a cost penalty."

Wild cards
Not to be ignored are a handful of alternative approaches. For instance, Design of Systems on Silicon (DS2; Paterna, Spain) has had a power line chip set on the market for about two years. The design house's chips work both as a broadband-over-power line access technology as well as a home-networking technology. With a 200-Mbit/s PHY, the company claims it can squeeze out about 130 Mbits/s to 150 Mbits/s at the application layer. So far, DS2's biggest deployment is as a home-networking solution with Spain's Telefonica SA, which has one of the largest Internet Protocol television (IPTV) rollouts in Europe. The company says it will soon have a cost-down version of its chip set and is tweaking the firmware to improve performance.

In Asia, Ruckus Wireless Inc. is making noise with a limited deployment through Hong Kong-based telco PCCW-HKT Ltd., the largest operator of IPTV in the region. Ruckus uses its proprietary BeamFlex smart-antenna technology and SmartCast software packet sniffer to prioritize multimedia packets and steer Wi-Fi signals around interference for better throughput.

"We believe that wireless can be made reliable enough for general distribution of paid content throughout the home," said Ruckus CTO Bill Kish.

IEEE's 802.11n is also on the horizon, with its PHY-layer throughput of 100 Mbits/s or more. Before that, incremental changes, such as those included in 802.11e, will also improve the throughput of Wi-Fi and its reliability for video delivery over self-installed home networks. Microsoft Corp. is also expected to make improvements in Windows Vista that will make it easier for consumers to set up home networks.

"The Windows Vista network stack has been rewritten from the ground up, resulting in significant throughput improvements, which directly benefit high-bit-rate video streaming," said Gabe Frost, program manager for transports and connectivity at Microsoft. "In fact, special care is given to video packets to enable a glitch-free experience, even during high CPU load. A next-generation QoS [quality-of-service] platform, called Quality Windows Audio/Video Experience, or qWave, enables media server applications to dynamically adapt to variable wireless conditions."

Then there is the emerging role of ultrawideband. First-generation UWB is basically for high-bandwidth data file transfers over short distances, or the transfer of compressed video streams from a set-top box to a display. But different uses are on the horizon. Motorola, for instance, is looking at a number of ways, including derivatives of UWB, to transfer uncompressed high-definition video to display devices without an HDMI cable. "You need basically a gig of bandwidth to take it direct without compression, and I can see that kind of stuff happening in the 2007 time frame," said Sokola of Motorola.

UWB could also play a role in wired home networks. "We are demonstrating the early parts of 1394a over coax today, and it's ultrawideband technology being pumped through the coax that's doing it," said Bruce Watkins, president and chief operating officer of PulseLink Inc. The company's current spec details throughput of more than 100 Mbits/s for its UWB-based CWave technology in transferring multiple streams of high-definition video over coax wiring, which can then be sent via wireless UWB from a personal video recorder or set-top box to the display. The company also says it can deliver streams over power lines, albeit at lower throughput.

As the year unfolds with all of the various technologies invading the home, one thing is clear: Consumers shouldn't be able to notice them. Unlike today's Internet-oriented home networks, tomorrow's triple-play networks need to be inconspicuous, and that's what operators are pushing for. Even as additional devices, such as cell phones, are drawn into the home network to enable things like control of DVRs from outside the home, the most likely path to popularization will be if operators take the lead and merge the functionality into an overall service package.

As the industry moves toward such a milestone, organizations like the Digital Living Network Alliance and the recently formed High-Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance have huge potential to help the process along. But making the network invisible to users won't be a cinch-so far, noted one observer, the effort has been mired by conflicting interests arguing about how these acronyms and those acronyms are going to work better than the other acronyms. "When I can explain it to my friends as 'You plug this one wire into this one hole and then you use your TV remote control to run everything'-when it's that simple-that's when people are going to start using it," said Watkins. "Anything less is more of the same."