Draft IEEE 1905 Standard Expected Next Month
A draft of the IEEE 1905 standard that would set up seamless home networking among Wi-Fi, Multimedia over Coax (MoCA), HomePlug and Ethernet is set to be considered in December by the IEEE working group in charge of it, executives said at the HomePlug Alliance technology conference outside San Francisco Wednesday. That would pave the way for 1905-compliant products to hit the market in time for the 2012 holidays, they said. But setting up a certification program could take longer, they said. The groups behind the 1905 standard are looking to set up a “consortium of consortiums” to handle certification, but that could take time, said Purva Rajkotia, director of product management, standard and regulation for Qualcomm Atheros, a HomePlug silicon vendor.
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The groups behind 1905 hope the standard will help meet growing consumer home networking bandwidth demands, executives said. “It leverages everyone’s value proposition,” said Rob Gelphman, chair of the marketing work group at MoCA. “It kind of unites the big three industry consortiums in home networking” to help make home networking easier for service providers and consumers, he said. It will also help increase the coverage of home networks within the house, said Rida Zouaoui, France Telecom’s head of access networks standardization. “We believe we have a chance to cover 99 percent of the home and avoid having black holes” in home network coverage.
Combining different home networking standards will also help boost the capacity and redundancy of home networks, said Hendrik van der Meer, Broadcom senior product line manager. It can also help deliver a higher quality of service by balancing the network use based on what type of data is being shared, he said. “Load balancing will make sure the right path is taken for particular data,” he said.
Packet routing decisions will be enabled by the 1905 standard, but it will be up to the implementers to decide how to use them, said Scott Willy, vice president-regulatory and standardization work at SPiDCOM. “In the initial version of this, we're not mandating a particular routing protocol,” he said. That means service providers such as pay-TV operators or ISPs could decide how to move certain content around the home, he said. “If there was a demand from a service provider to say a certain type of content would only go on Wi-Fi and never on coax, that could be one of the rules made at higher levels,” he said.
If the 1905 working group sticks to the proposed timeline, the standard could be voted on by March 2012, Willy said.