EETimes:
Cable homes in on network's gateway
By Junko Yoshida and Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(12/10/99, 5:14 p.m. EDT)
LOS ANGELES ? The scramble to define a broadband home gateway will take center stage as cable TV silicon, system and service companies gather at the Western Show next week. The product and standards initiatives discussed here will seek to drive home-network hubs up a notch to embrace voice and video as well as data, creating a consumer platform some say may be as significant as the PC.
Gearing up for the job, Broadcom Corp. (Irvine, Calif.) will roll a single-chip cable modem next week that leverages a new 10-Mbit/second consumer networking spec from the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance as well as Broadcom's own voice-over-Internet Protocol technology. Working the wireless angle, ShareWave Inc. (El Dorado Hills, Calif.) will launch a family of home-networking controllers that extend to 11 Mbits/s, tapping the IEEE 802.11b standard.
Meanwhile, IEEE's 802.11 committee is considering extensions to its wireless Ethernet standard that would smooth the path for time-sensitive voice and video data and provide quality-of-service (QoS) features. That comes as the potentially competing HomeRF spec for a low-cost wireless net stands poised for a speed upgrade from 1.6 to 10 Mbits/s, pending a regulatory decision. And still other high-bandwidth consumer network technologies are waiting in the wings.
In the cable community, the cresting activity in high-bandwidth home nets raises incompatibility concerns. Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs) is at potential problems, said Terry D. Shaw, senior adviser for network systems there. The industry group has set up a home network task force, chaired by AT&T vice president of broadband technology Glen Edens, to seek home-networking solutions capable of delivering cable-based services with carrier-grade quality.
CableLabs divided the in-home-networking issues in two segments and issued two separate requests for information (RFIs) in September. One RFI, targeting "in-home transport," is scouting technologies designed to ship bits around the home; the other covers the "media access point," which is essentially a broadband home network interface.
The goal is to find home-networking building blocks that "fit well with a portfolio of CableLabs' specifications, such as Docsis, OpenCable and PacketCable," Shaw said. He noted that CableLabs is still looking for "where the holes are" but said it plans to "formulate a strategic position on the in-home-networking issues by February."
Edens said CableLabs' initial architectural concepts call for a digital splitter, or a device outside the house that splits analog and digital services, allowing a variety of carriers to offer phone service. The group will also require a Media Access Gateway, a platform assumed to carry the functions of a firewall and virtual private network provisioning system.
Such residential gateways are increasingly hot-button issues in the electronics industry. Michael Wolf, an analyst with Cahners In-Stat (Scottsdale, Ariz.), said it makes sense for cable-modem providers to want to become gateway providers. "Cable modems will eventually morph into what we call residential gateways," he said.
But the definition of a broadband home gateway remains elusive. It could be a PC, set-top box or cable modem inside the home, or a router or network interface module outside it. In either case, the box would likely channel digital movies, Web audio files and Internet Protocol (IP) voice calls as well as data to various TVs, PCs, stereos and phones around the house.
"So many different players are scrambling to get control of this node," observed Tim Lindenfelser, vice president of marketing at Broadcom. "This [residential gateway] could be as important as the next computing platform."
"The gateway concept would not work without a robust LAN technology" at its core, said Jeff Thermond, vice president and general manager of the home-networking business unit at Broadcom. Thermond founded Epigram (recently acquired by Broadcom), which designed a 10-Mbit/s chip for home phone lines that became the core of the HomePNA 2.0 spec.
Priority levels
HomePNA 2.0, released Dec. 1, supports eight priority levels for quality of service and delivers technology with the ability to send concurrent voice, video and data on existing home phone lines at speeds of 10 Mbits/s and beyond. "Already, 2 million chip sets based on HomePNA 1.0 and 2.0 specifications were shipped this year," Thermond said. "We expect it to grow to 4 million to 8 million by the end of 2000."Among wireless options, the IEEE 802.11b spec is one horse that ShareWave and others hope to ride.
ShareWave is introducing a family of home-networking controllers designed to interface gluelessly with IEEE 802.11b baseband and digital radio front-end components. The company plans to "embrace and extend the emerging 802.11b spec for quality-of-service and multimedia applications," said Naresh Baliga, a ShareWave vice president.
Current wireless Ethernet standards do not fully address the requirements for distribution of isochronous data within the home. A MAC Enhancements study group, set up within the IEEE 802.11b group, recently completed its technical and economic feasibility studies on building QoS and security into the standard. It is waiting for the parent IEEE 802 group to authorize an enhancements project targeting media-access control, according to John Fakatselis, chairman of the study group, which hopes to release its first draft by November 2000.
Elsewhere in wireless, the 1.6-Mbit/s HomeRF is a comer. Ben Manny, director of residential communications at Intel Architecture Labs and chairman of the HomeRF working group, said that the media-access control for HomeRF is designed to handle time-sensitive voice and video services, since it combines the contention characteristics of 802.11 with aspects of the Digital European Cordless Telephone (DECT) standard. HomeRF uses the Shared Wireless Access Protocol, which supports peer-based data services as well as time-division multiplexed voice.
The first shipments of HomeRF products, expected next year, will include an asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) gateway from Cayman Systems, PC add-in cards from Intel and IBM, and a desktop HomeRF solution from Compaq Computer Corp. HomeRF may be set for a data-rate upgrade, thanks to a rule change proposed to the Federal Communications Commission by the HomeRF Working Group. The proposal would add 3- and 5-MHz bandwidth channels to the 2.45-GHz ISM band. In principle, it would give spread-spectrum frequency-hopping radios the same ?leg room? allowed by 802.11 direct-sequence radios and would allow 5- and 10-Mbits/s data rates.
FCC officials said last week they expect to complete the spread-spectrum proceeding sometime early next year. The agency is leaning toward amending its rules to permit frequency-hopping systems using wider bandwidths. The likely outcome of the FCC review will be approval of 3- and 5-MHz frequency-hopping systems without "disallowing" existing 1-MHz systems, an FCC spokesman said last week.
Even at the current 1.6-Mbit rate, wireless LAN maker Proxim Inc. is providing its HomeRF radio technology to Next Level Communications Inc. (Rohnert Park, Calif.) for integration into Next Level's coming generation of residential gateways, based on very-high-bit-rate DSL access technology.
Ram Rao, assistant vice president of technology at Next Level, said the first-generation gateway from his company does not support full video services and only provides POTS phone lines through a splitter on the network interface unit.
The 25-Mbit/s capability of VDSL, however, offers adequate bandwidth for some video, data services, derived POTS and packetized voice services, Rao said. A dark-horse contender in wireless is the 721-kbit/s Bluetooth spec just coming to market. Most Bluetooth products coming out in early 2000 will only cover a "personal bubble" 10 meters in diameter.
However, Asif Malik, product marketing manager at Ericsson's Home Networks group, said that 100-meter "home bubble" nodes are in development at Ericsson and other Bluetooth backers and are expected to sample later next year.
Back in the wired world, work is proceeding apace on common home backbones in development by the Video Electronics Standards Association and the IEEE 1394B group, said Joe DiGirolamo, senior program manager at Lexmark International and chairman of the VESA Home Network Committee. The first generation of VHN, incorporating the long-range version of 1394, can handle CATV, phone, CEbus and 1394 direct broadcast nodes.
Copper wires
To create a robust backbone for video signals, DiGirolamo said, the committee had to abandon Category 1 and 3 wiring, common in many homes, and "draw the line within VESA to say Category 5 copper had to be supported."
Version 1 of the spec will be voted on within a few months. Meanwhile, the VHN committee is moving to Version 2, which will support synchronous clocks, isochronous telephony, security features and IP Version 6.
One group trying to tie it all together is the Open Services Gateway Initiative, a 35-member consortium chaired by John Barr, director of Internet architectures at Motorola's personal networking group. Sun Microsystems Inc. helped bring the OSGi group together as part of the Java-Enabled Server development effort. The concept was to abstract services as a series of application programming interface calls-first for a WAN access and home gateway platform but later for automotive or even personal-area-network gateways.
Initial implementations are based on Java and use the Internet Protocol. But the OSGi spec is wide enough to allow for alternative scripting or programming languages and for circuit-like services based on time-division multiplexing.
"The ultimate goal is that a network operator should be able to specify the service, and the gateway can perform the local client tasks of provisioning, managing and delivering the service in a manner that minimizes the task of the service provider and requires no intervention from the home end user," Barr said.
Cable operators had "better get their hands around [in-home-networking technology] now," warned Broadcom's Lindenfelser. Otherwise, he said, the opportunity to rule the platform may slip away quickly.
Just how big-or small-that opportunity might be is the object of some debate between those who see home networking as the next big thing and others who view it as a vendor-inspired mirage. Wolf of In-Stat said several physical-layer options stand a chance of moving into high-volume sales in 2000, provided manufacturers remember to keep the networking equipment as simple and self-configuring as possible, since consumers will expect plug-in-and-run network nodes.
The home network market grew 18 percent sequentially in the third quarter, and In-Stat expects the market to have reached $137 million in end-user sales by year's end. The total will rise to $250 million in annual sales in 2000, Wolf predicted.
But component manufacturers and OEMs still get poor grades, Wolf said, for their slow progress in making their products simple, reaching common standards and developing useful applications. That, in turn, could slow market growth over the next two years. - Craig Matsumoto and George Leopold contributed to this report. |
