January 8, 2007

The Year of the Home - Network

By Jim Barthold

If the pre-show vendor buzz at CES means anything, 2007 will go down as the year of the home network. Now that anybody with a wire – and even some without a wire – are pumping broadband into residences, vendors are queuing up with ways to move that content to the multiple consumer devices that can receive it via advanced home networks that transcend stringing cable from room to room.

Home networking is "moving far faster that I ever expected. Users are not content with just getting the content into a box in front of their big TV; they want to move it around," said Dov Rubin, vice president/general manager of NDS Americas, which is providing conditional access (CA) and digital rights management (DRM) software for the content to protect it as it moves to different devices around the premises.

Other companies are taking a more hardware-driven approach. Amedia Networks, for instance, anticipates that Internet-driven content will be ready for prime time this year, so it's building an all-in-one residential gateway to "bring that content onto your TV set without the need of running into your PC to make it possible," according to Frank Galuppo, the company's president-CEO.

Not your typical cable vendor

Amedia is not a cable vendor, even though its business resembles the cable-centric premise that there will "ultimately be a convergence of voice, video and data coming over a fiber-to-the-node or fiber-to-the-premise facility" to a residential workstation that Amedia hopes to provide, Galuppo said. "Since all the traffic is going to hit there, why not make all the routing and storage decisions right there as it enters the home?"

Amedia, he said, has "simplified the whole home networking solution."

The company's interface includes a Web portal that delivers a menu to the TV set, letting consumers browse the Internet, view movies stored on a media adapter in the home, or through a hard drive that Amedia plans to incorporate with its product and generally mix-and-match video entertainment from traditional and nontraditional IP sources fed to TV sets and other screens.

The Amedia business case, it should be noted, is built on a premise that's perhaps just slightly more solid than sand: that high-bandwidth IPTV will happen.

Carriers and IPTV

"The ultimate solution is for carriers to move to IPTV, and then they can bring content down from either an IPTV headend where the video is received and converted to IP packets, or it can be brought off the Internet," Galuppo said. "In either case, it has to go through an IP set-top box."

That's problem No. 1, but there are a few more speed bumps that might also jar Amedia's progress, including the fact that content from various Internet sources has codecs that must be negotiated to transcode the video signal into the TV set, Galuppo said.

"Where is the codec software going to reside? In the set-top box? In a gateway like ours?" Galuppo asks. "That's the next challenge for us to overcome."

Of course, there's a bigger challenge – at least as perceived by some – in the fact that Amedia's fussy about the way it receives the content at the premises.

VDSL or bust

"We're a VDSL2 interface on the WAN (wide area network) side, so at the moment we can only accommodate VDSL2," he said. "We will be able to accommodate VDSL1 in the next several months with a new set of chips from Ikanos, but we cannot terminate ADSL2+."

Since many U.S. IPTV deployments now use some version of ADSL, Amedia might be off on the wrong foot, even if it does have an OEM agreement with Motorola. Galuppo figures the growth in IP content from unconventional sources like YouTube and ABC.com, however, will change that and force service providers to the higher bandwidths provided by VDSL.

"It's only a mater of time before ABC.com and others start launching MPEG-2 files from their Web sites on programming that was shown the night before to be viewed not only on your PC. but also on your TV set. It's coming, and it's coming quickly," he said.

When it comes, it will require a fat pipe to deliver it to the home, and Amedia, he hopes, will be there to receive it from that pipe.

- Jim Barthold