Avio Digital demos home network
eet.com
By Margaret Quan
EE Times
(12/04/98, 5:03 p.m. EDT)
SAN CARLOS, Calif. — Avio Digital demonstrated a home networking
technology called Media Wire at the Western Cable show in Anaheim, Calif.,
this week. While this is the latest company to introduce a phone-line-based
home network at least one analyst says it has yet to be proved whether home
owners need such networks.
Bob Merritt, analyst at Semico Research (Phoenix), believes that where
home networking is concerned, technology that isn't solving an immediate
problem is a technology moving faster than the requirements.
Though the need to send data between devices in the home is supported by
the number of homes with more than one PC, Merritt said, the need to share
high-bandwidth video and audio streams through the home has not yet been
proved.
Media Wire's technology enables transmission of CD-quality audio, DVD
and HDTV video, telephony, computer data and home-control signals through
the home. Avio Digital is a spin-off of Interval Research Corp (Palo Alto,
Calif.), a company headed by Paul G. Allen, one of Microsoft's co-founders.
At the Western show Avio Digital used a Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 2000
digital set-top box equipped with its node technology to send video and audio
signals to various locations within the Scientific-Atlanta booth.
Avio Digital claims MediaWire can send digital media, including DVD and
HDTV, at speeds up to 88 Mbits/second and as far as 33 meters between
network nodes. The company said the MediaWire network can support a
total cable length of more than 4,000 meters.
The 20-person San Carlos, Calif., startup is reluctant to detail the technology,
describing MediaWire only as a "synchronous, media-centric network with
tight tolerances on timing and low-cost nodes," making it suitable for sending
digital video and audio through the average home, said Avio Digital's vice
president of engineering Don Burtis.
Avio Digital said MediaWire can handle four MPEG video channels
(operating at 6 Mbits/s each), up to sixteen 24-bit audio channels streams, up
to eight phone or ISDN lines simultaneously and still have more than 3
Mbits/second to send data through the home.
While it can handle data, MediaWire is designed to be media-centric, rather
than data-centric and synchronous rather than packet-based, said Avio
Digital's Burtis.
Avio Digital plans to license MediaWire to consumer electronics companies
to embed in devices as well as to chip companies that want to manufacture
the Avio Digital-designed ASICs that sit at the network nodes. The company
anticipates MediaWire products will be available by late 1999 to early 2000.
MediaWire seems to appeal to a broader market than some other
home-networking technologies, Avio Digital's Burtis contends, because
MediaWire is designed to run on category 3 phone wire, which is found in
more homes than category 5 phone wire, the kind of wire required by
high-speed digital interfaces.
Avio Digital's base technology and the company itself is the result of three
years of research and development by Avio's parent, Interval Research,
which styles itself as something of a Xerox Parc for the '90s.
Interval boasts such tech-savvy visionaries as president David Liddle and
Arati Prabakar, former director of NIST, who is vice president of research.
Avio Digital recently announced the arrival of Eugene Van Bergen, a Philips
Business Electronics executive, as president and chief executive officer.
Avio Digital is funded by seed investments from Vulcan Ventures Inc.
(Bellevue, Wash.) and Interval, both owned by Allen.
Interval has applied for patents on the home-networking technology, but they
have not been granted yet, Burtis said.
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