DS2 Blog

G.hn: reducing chip count by 50%

There is a growing interest among Telco/Cable Service Providers in deploying networks that can take advantage of all the existing wires available in the home (power lines, phone lines and coaxial cables).

Until recently, there was a number a proprietary technologies for wired networking, but each one of them was designed for one single medium (ie, one technology for powerline only, another for coaxial cable only, and so on).

Each of these technologies is fundamentally different from each other, so networking chips have to be specialized: For example, a chip designed to operate over coaxial cable cannot work over powerlines.

Why are the chips different? In many cases, the reason is simply that they were designed in separate groups, inside closed organizations, which took different decisions when choosing technical elements such modulation type, Forward Error Correction, QoS architecture, Security architecture, etc.

IEEE Communications Magazine paper on G.hn

With the recent approval of G.hn at ITU last week, IEEE Communications Magazine couldn't have chosen a better timing for the publication this month of the paper "G.hn: The New ITU-T Home Networking Standard", by my friends Vladimir Oksman (Infineon Technologies) and Stefano Galli (Panasonic Corporation).

Oksman and Galli are some of the most active participants at the ITU group in which Recommendation G.9960 (the Physical layer of G.hn) was developed. The paper, which is available for download at the HomeGrid Forum website, provides a good overview of the G.hn standard, including the overall architecture, the Physical Layer (Recommendation G.9960) and the Data Link Layer (Recommendation G.9961).

The paper provides interesting information on the issue of the Forward Error Correction (FEC) used in G.hn.

IBM Global Financing to Speed up Broadband Access to Rural America With New Financing That Benefits IBEC and DS2

IBM Global Financing, the lending and leasing business segment of IBM recently announced a financing agreement with DS2 and International Broadband Electric Communications, Inc (IBEC).  DS2 provides important integrated chip technology to IBEC for the manufacture of Broadband over Power Line Regenerating Unit (BRU) smart boxes. IBEC´s smart boxes which are about the size of an ordinary desktop computer tower,  are attached to a common electric utility pole and activate to provide high-speed Internet signals to households that previously had only limited or dial-up access to the Internet.