Wrapup

I dinged the HomePlug Turbo folks for advertising 85 Mbps and delivering an average of 10, so let's see if DS2 does any better. Table 1 compares the % reduction from the advertised maximum throughput for the Corinex AV200 powerline and Netgear XE104 "85 Mbps" (HomePlug Turbo) for each of my five test locations.

Although the Corinex' best-case throughput of 65% is better than the Netgear's 71%, the other values are similar enough that DS2 deserves as much of a "shame on you" as I awarded to Intellon for selling high and delivering (relatively) low on throughput.

That having been said, however, it's clear that DS2's technology delivered consistently better performance than HomePlug turbo in my test environment.

Table 1: Actual Throughput Reduction
from Advertised Maximum

The big question is why did DS2 design its technology so that it doesn't nicely coexist with HomePlug? It's not as if DS2 doesn't know what it takes to have its 200 Mbps technology coexist with both the installed base of HomePlug 1.0 and 1.0 plus Turbo products. After all, DS2 joined the HomePlug board at the beginning of 2004 (but at some point left both the board and HomePlug entirely).

What we have here is yet another case of a grab for marketshare using incompatibility with a competitive technology as a weapon. And, as usual, the consumer is once again thrown into the middle. Granted, that AV200 products aren't intended to be a big retail item. But consumers could be put into the position of having to throw out any HomePlug products they have when they sign up for an IPTV service that uses DS2-based powerline technology to distribute the service throughout a home.

As much as DS2 and HomePlug wish the other would go away, both are probably going to be around for the foreseeable future. HomePlug AV - which incidentally doesn't interoperate with HomePlug 1.0 and Turbo, but cooperates with them to share bandwidth - will eventually make it out of the labs and into consumer homes. Indications are that the HomePlug AV and DS2 technologies will battle each other for powerline bandwidth even more severely than has been shown for HomePlug 1.0 / Turbo and DS2. So all companies involved are going to need to confront this issue in a more constructive way or face consumer (and hopefully service provider) resistance.

Fortunately, the new leadership in the HomePlug Alliance seems to understand what's at stake and recently announced a new "compliance, interoperability and coexistence program". This initiative includes working with the IEEE P1901 Work Group and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Powerline Coexistence Work Group - the same groups that DS2 has been working with on the same issues.

The good news from all of this is that there is a powerline-based networking alternative that appears to be capable of supporting a few video streams and even some simultaneous good old data traffic to boot. Now if everyone would please just get along, maybe there will be room for everyone in the shiny, happy powerline-networked streaming video future, eh?

Join our discussion on this topic