Tech giants coalesce for a powerline home networking standard

Intel, Panasonic, Infineon, and TI are among the charter members of a group dedicated to creating a new worldwide standard for transferring digital media over power, phone, and coaxial cables.

Companies and consumers have long talked about a possible system capable of linking devices in the home together so they can be controlled using a PC or notebook. While Intel's Viiv and AMD's Live platform have been around for a few years already -- and Windows Media Edition plays a critical role there -- there still is lacking a certain interoperability that could bridge together all of a home's media-capable devices, using wiring that homes already have in place.

"HomeGrid Forum was created to support the development of a single standard for transmitting multimedia over coax, power and phone lines," HomeGrid Forum President Matthew Theall said in an official statement. "The forum will promote HomeGrid-certified products and ensure interoperability."

The Forum's participating companies hope to further develop ITU-T G.hn, which is an International Telecommunications Union standard based on a PHY/MAC technology.

Organizers of the HomeGrid Forum have created three internal work groups: a contribution work group to help develop technologies, a compliance and interoperability work group to make sure all HomeGrid technologies will work properly, and a marketing group to help promote the group and its products.

HomeGrid Forum's eleven charter members hope ITU-T G.hn will receive preliminary specification this year with the final specification before September 2009. Once that is completed, manufacturers may then decide when to release products that are HomeGrid Forum compliant.

The new group aims to mimic the role that the Wi-Fi Alliance played in implementing wireless networking standards in the home. That organization helped promote wireless standards approved by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Consumers can wirelessly link home devices with ease due to strict standards, but users connecting devices using coax, power and phone lines have to deal with multiple standards that can overly complicate the process.