Powerline home networking could come to Vista

DS2 now claims to be the only powerline vendor offering on-board support for the LLPD network mapping protocol in Microsoft's Vista. But is LLPD really simple enough for use in home networking? And what are the chances anyway for a technology that runs over home electrical wiring?

Attempting to make it easier for consumers to figure out their home networking connections, DS2 -- a top maker of the powerline equipment that works over home electrical wiring -- has now added full support for a feature in Microsoft's Vista OS that supports the display of computers, network adapters, routers and other devices on an easy-to-read network map.

In an announcement issued this morning, DS2 claimed to be the only vendor in the economical powerline home networking market to be providing native support for Microsoft's Link Layer Topology Disccovery (LLPD) protocol directly on-board its Altana chip.

By showing devices and their relationships on the network inside a simple chart on the PC screen, LLPD is supposed to help Vista users quickly find and fix network connectivity problems.

The on-board support in DS2's powerline chips is aimed at eliminating the time, expense, and possible home network slowdown of adding external processors and memory for supporting LLPD.

At CES 2008 next week, DS2 is expected to show new 400 Mbps editions of its Altana chips containing the LLPD support. Although not yet fast enough to support delivery of high-definition video over home electrical wiring, the 400 Mbps chips offer a big boost in speed over the 200 Mbps chips that DS2 has previously demonstrated at CES.

DS2's chips are used in networking equipment deployed by several big ISPs in Europe, as well as in home networking products sold in the US, Europe, and other parts of the world.

In the US, the chips appear most commonly in powerline home networking products from NetGear.

DS2's chips, though, are not compatible with powerline home networking devices from a number of other vendors, including vendors supporting either the HomePlug AV protocol or the HomePlug Power Alliance -- who are not providing on-board support for LLPD, anyway.

At the end of last October, members of these two rivaling camps announced their intentions to work together on a common powerline networking standard within the umbrella on the IEEE standards group.

Moreover, although LLPD supports the display of networking devices on simple charts, it isn't necessarily child's play to try to exploit the LLPD capabilities in Vista. So, how useful will LLPD really be to the lion's share of consumers?

For example, in order to see devices that are running Windows XP -- as opposed to Vista -- you are required to download and install a program known as LLTD Responder on those devices -- as well as to download and install Windows XP Service Pack 2, if that isn't installed already.

DS2 has also pointed to plans to give its 400 Mbps chips the ability to work on the copper networking wiring which is now growing more ubiquitous in US homes, in addition to the previously supported electrical wiring.