MANHASSET, N.Y. — Companies developing chips for home networks powered by ac power lines have stepped up to the plate with silicon and OEM deals, even as industry analysts continued to view a power-line-based solution as the dark horse among home networking technologies.
Novell spin-off Inari Corp. (Draper, Utah) said that three OEMs have signed up to use its 2-Mbit/second chips in system products that will ship in 2001. Inari is promising a 12-Mbit/s device by the third quarter.
And Intellon Corp. (Ocala, Fla.) demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show this week a multichip prototype of a single-chip solution it expects to begin sampling in April, a quarter later than originally scheduled. Also at CES, three companies demonstrated products that will roll this year using the Intellon solution, which is said to provide data networking speeds of up to 14 Mbits/s.
Meanwhile, the Home Plug Alliance says it has finalized its home networking specification and is about to begin field tests in residences in North America, Europe and Japan. The alliance is one of three groups hammering out standards for power-line-based home networking, and analysts see the multiplicity of standards as one of the issues dogging this technology.
"Power-line is the dark horse for home networking," said Mike Wolf, analyst and manager of Cahners InStat's voice and data service (Phoenix). "The problem is the silicon still has to be field-tested and ramped up to volume production. And aside from any testing, there is the valid question of whether consumers will 'get' power-line networking."
Nevertheless, power-line home networking could see success if field trials are completed on time and chip providers deliver the goods. InStat projects that sales of power-line-based home networking equipment could grow from $2.6 million in 2000 to $267 million by 2004.
In Inari's corner are Mitsubishi Materials Corp., Interactive Objects and Telocity, all of which said they will have products built around Inari chips out on the market this year.
Mitsubishi Materials (Tokyo), an electronic-component provider to the Asian market, will incorporate the Inari chip set into its network adapters. Interactive Objects (Bellevue, Wash.), a designer of hardware/software solutions for digital audio appliances, will develop an audio/video delivery platform for the home that will enable consumers to move MP3 files from a PC's hard drive to a home entertainment system over the power line.
In addition, Telocity, a Bay Area digital subscriber line provider, has agreed to bundle Thomson Multimedia's RCA System Link home network adapter, which contains an Inari chip, into its DSL home gateway products. (Thomson Multimedia signed a deal for Inari chips in 2000 and began receiving shipments in December.)
According to Inari vice president of marketing Ryan Ashton, the deals will serve "to create an installed base of power-line home networking users." The company's goal is to see 100,000 Inari-enabled networking nodes installed in 2001 and, in the long term, to enable consumers to have the Internet at every ac outlet in their home.
To that end, Inari says it is working with major networking companies to develop power-line-enabled Internet appliances that would sit at a home's back door like a power meter. Inari is also working with the Consumer Electronics Association's R7.3 committee to create standards for power-line networking, and with the European-based PLCForum standards body. The company's founder and chief technology officer, Alan Walback, was recently named to the PLCForum's board of directors.
Meanwhile, Inari engineers are putting the finishing touches on a second-generation, 12-Mbit/s chip set for introduction by the third quarter. Like the initial 2-Mbit/s device, the new solution will be based on a discrete carrier scheme, using 24 of them instead of the four discrete carriers in the 2-Mbit chip.
Intellon, whose chip has been chosen as the technology of choice by the HomePlug Alliance, said the scheduled rollout of its integrated, single-chip device has been delayed so that engineers could add features required by the alliance.
Elliott Newcombe, director of product marketing, said the company added support for quality of service for simultaneous, low-latency applications such as audio/video streaming, Internet Protocol telephony and data trafficking; increased the efficiency of the protocol; added encryption to isolate homes on the same power grid; added bridging capability between the power line and Ethernet, wireless and other networks; and added filtering to eliminate interference with amateur-radio networks.
Products in 2001
At the Consumer Electronics Show, SonicBlue, Phonex Broadband and Motorola all showed off products that use the Intellon solution. All are to be introduced in 2001.
SonicBlue Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) rolled out its HomeFree network adapter kit for PCs; Phonex Broadband Corp. (Midvale, Utah) unveiled a wall adapter that connects to the power line using USB or Ethernet; and Motorola (Schaumburg, Ill.) showed a cable modem using the chip.
Intellon markets the solution as a 14-Mbit/s chip set, a speed Newcombe called the "theoretical limits" of the technology, even though the HomePlug Alliance defines the first-generation specification speed at 10 Mbits/s to account for differences between homes and regional power-line access.
More than 70 companies, including AMD, Motorola and Texas Instruments, support the HomePlug Alliance, which has yet to resolve questions of how power-line networking connectivity will migrate into systems.
"The logical choice is to put it in the power supply, but these are very low-margin products, and adding $20 to the bill of materials will certainly not be digested well by the power supply manufacturers," noted InStat's Wolf.
