HomePNA Achieves 320Mbps With Copper

illeism writes "Ars Techinca is reporting that the HPNA has made a significant stride in copper speed. From the article: 'The HomePNA Alliance, backers of a networking spec that works over coaxial or twisted pair wiring, has announced the release of the HPNA 3.1 specification. The big news comes in the form of a speed jump from 128Mbps to 320Mbps, which pushes it above competing networking standards HomePlug AV and MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) for the title of fastest networking tech outside of gigabit Ethernet and makes it a more attractive option for triple-play providers.'"

Comments

What?

[slughead]

The big news comes in the form of a speed jump from 128Mbps to 320Mbps, which pushes it above competing networking standards HomePlug AV and MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) for the title of fastest networking tech outside of gigabit Ethernet and makes it a more attractive option for triple-play providers.'"

What was wrong with gigabit ethernet?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using legacy hardware in place in your home, such as coax or existing twisted pair.

Re:What?

[Kenja]

"What was wrong with gigabit ethernet?"

It requires CAT-6e certified twisted pair cables and wont run over existing house wiring.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all houses are Cat5/6 wired (non-slashdotters) or want wireless. It's an alternative because you're taking advantage of existing wiring.

Re:What?

[cptgrudge]

What was wrong with gigabit ethernet?

Each run being limited to a length of 100 meters?

Re:What?

[tearmeapart]

What's wrong with my 10 gigabit ethernet? ( via my Intel PCI Express 10GbE CX4 cards).

Re:What?

[Ant P.]

Well for starters, you need a PCI-Extended slot to put that in, not a PCI-Express

Re:What?

[cheater512]

What house needs a stretch of cable longer than 100m?

I havent RTFM but I assume that this standard has the same 100m limitation.
The signal just grows too weak at long distances and when your transmitting at high speed you need all the signal you can get.

Re:What?

[vertinox]

Each run being limited to a length of 100 meters?

In that case...

What is wrong with using fiber? ;)

Re:What?

[afidel]

Wrong, modern Gigabit ethernet works over bog standard Cat5 with 5e only needed for runs at or over the 100m length limit. Hell using anything better than the cheapest of cheap cards we were able to do 100Mbps at 150m over Cat3 when I worked with Cisco wireless, PoE was a problem over Cat3 near 100m though =)

Re:What?

[cptgrudge]

The article doesn't say, but it is capable of "up to 50 devices spread up to 1,000 feet apart on a single network". Whatever that means. The advantage this has is that it is capable of multispectrum operation?

Seems kinda redundant, since most new houses are being run with cat6 cable. I guess it would be more useful for older houses where retrofitting would be a pain.

Re:What?

[cptgrudge]

Too expensive for consumer use, which is what this is supposed to be for?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you don't have good enough UTP, but you're certain you've got enough runs of unused and SUITABLE coax sitting there? Not just "any old coax" works. You need the right impedance, half-decent shielding, and preferably not 20yo cable that's all oxidized.

The odds of having all the coax one needs already in the right places and all is every bit as remote as already having 6e everywhere.

Also, Gbit ethernet is becoming very popular (built on pretty much all motherboards nowadays - also means one less thing to buy) and is a well know and well supported standard. Switching equipment has come down a LOT in price too. And it's faster. And basically anything plugs on that network (good luck plugging your xbox or such devices on this new coax thing - even a laptop will need a new PCMCIA NIC at least)

Between pulling new 6e and buying a bunch of weird (and possibly expensive and not necessarily well supported) network cards and pull lots of new coax (and also need to buy a nice new F-plug crimper, coax stripper and such), I sure know what I pick.

Too little, too late. Especially with the faster wireless technologies coming up.

Re:What?

[k0lee]

When I was younger and electricity was still being installed in homes, it was necessary to run wire in existing walls. This was a challenge because the lath and mortar walls had little room to get the wire through them (dry wall had not yet been invented). We figured out how to wire the homes using drop chains and fish tape to get the wires to where they needed to be. I drilled a lot of holes by hand. Now that people are faced with running CAT5E through walls, they are stymied and instead are trying to figure out ways around it by superimposing high frequency networking signals on to existing copper (like phone or power wire). Even worse, they decide to pollute the RF spectrum by using wireless networking to interface fixed equipment. Wireless networking should be used for mobile, battery-powered equipment, and nothing else. But I digress...

I experimented with HPNA in the 2.0 era (around 2001) and found that it over delivered as far as throughput. Its throughput buried the equivalent Wifi and it was rock solid even during simultaneous use of the copper with analog phone calls and DSL connections. But then the HPNA manufacturers abandoned the market. I don't have faith that anyone credible will come in to implement the HPNA 3.0 spec.

I've since given up on the mis-application of copper media and have instead gotten out my drill, drop chain, and fish tape and recommend you do the same. Gbit over CAT5E is cheap and reliable and will be around for many years whereas the non-standard interfaces will fall by the wayside.

-Lee
http://www.k0lee.com/

Re:What?

[asuffield]

Seems kinda redundant, since most new houses are being run with cat6 cable.

Where, and for how many millions do they sell?

Cat6 is no joke. This is not something your average building contractor can handle. It is harder to work with than fibre. Explaning the physical behaviour of the cable requires quantum physics (most of the energy travels outside the copper conductor, as an electromagnetic field). Everything has to be done precisely correctly. The way you handle the cable while pulling it. The order in which you punch down the wires into the patch panels. The spacing of the cable ties (I am not kidding, this is essential - the field is passing through that space and the ties can cause harmful interference if misplaced). Get any of it wrong and it won't work. Pulling cat6 cable and installing it to cat5e specs is a waste of money, because cat5e is all you'll ever get out of it.

You are almost always better off with a mixture of fibre and cat5e.

Re:What?

[cptgrudge]

Sorry, I call bullshit. Namely, because of this part:

How can I determine the installation requirements for Cat 6 such as termination, minimum radius around corners, proximity to electrical devices (ballasts, wiring, etc.)?

The requirements for installation of Category 6 are essentially the same as the requirements for Category 5e. Installation practices are in the TIA-568-B.1 and TIA-569-A documents.

As long as you use hardware that is cat6 compliant, which has a small cost premium, you'll be fine.

Re:What?

[Shag]

And the 100-meter limit applies to Home networking... because...?

There aren't a lot of homes out there where that's going to be a problem.

But whats the latency?

[Kenja]

In my experience with such networks, its not the transfer speed but the response time that makes you want to chew your keyboard.

Re:But whats the latency?

[Kenja]

"Well if you had stopped to read the article blurb, you would have read that it is intended for triple-play providers (telephone, internet and multimedia/video). Thank you for your knee-jerk over-generalized comment though!"

Um, are you trying to claim that network latency has no effect on those things?

Re:But whats the latency?

[Fnkmaster]

Eh? A round trip through two HPNA 2.0 bridges adds about 2ms of latency to a packet from my empirical observations.

While I obviously wouldn't use a home networking standard for ultra performance critical networking applications, the latency of HPNA 2.0 is not something I ever perceptually notice, and I use it every day.

Re:But whats the latency?

[HoboMaster]

No. He's claiming that the latency is going to be very low, or these things would be worthless.

Re:But whats the latency?

[squiggleslash]

Triple-play providers tend to be large telecommunications conglomerates who want to use a smaller monopoly (or large market share in a particular market) to muscle into another territory that's telecommunications related in order to tie customers to their offerings. For example, a cable operator has a monopoly over cable TV provision (albeit one threatened by satellite.) To shore it up, you can use the same cables to provide the customers with Internet and telephone services. Suddenly, a desire to replace one of those services with a competitors becomes an expensive proposition, so customers end up essentially locked to that provisioner.

Now, the major types of companies that do this are:

1. Telephone companies. They've provided one low-latency data system for home use (ISDN), and in the US (where triple-play is taking off) didn't market it at all. xDSL is better suited for data, given it's packet switched, but has relatively poor latency. Do you think they care about latency?

2. Cable TV companies. Cable TV companies having been trying to foist "Digital Cable" on pretty much everyone for several years now. They've never done anything about the dreadful latency such systems have (where changing a channel takes seconds), despite it being the number one complaint of most users (to the point I know staggeringly high numbers who've gone back to analog). Do you think they care about latency?

3. Mobile phone operators. They're considering a whole bunch of systems based upon 3G and DVB-x systems to add triple-play to their offerings. Mobile phone companies. You know, the people that came up with EDGE and 1xRTT. The first generation of so-called 3G services, marketed as mobile versions of DSL, have lousy latency in the 200-500ms area. Those ones. Do you think they give a flying fuck about latency?

The point I'm making is that network latency doesn't seem to be the first, second, third, or twenty-eighth priority amongst the major suspects in the various industries that want to dominate this area. Few people are going to switch their ISP purely over latency issues if it means adding $20-50 to their no longer integrated monthly telecommunications bill.

Erm....?

[Sj0]

Is this story perhaps "320Mbps over coax", rather than over copper? If not, I don't see the accomplishment, since Gig ethernet has already done the same over copper...

Re:Erm....?

[York the Mysterious]

You're assuming you can wire for Gig Ethernet. Many people out there have extensive installations that barely work with 100mbit. For instance the building I'm in was built in 1992 and wired for Ethernet EXCEPT (a big except) the installers stables the cabling the studs. Won't make it above 10meg and even 10 meg has errors left and right. The building had to be rewired so we could go 100Mbit, but that's 500 drops in 4 different structures with 4 wiring closets to pull back to. Stuff like this is a big deal for colleges. There's plenty of colleges that only have their internal phone lines the the rooms and are delivering internet connections via DSL technology from their closets. Schools with 2000 students on campus and sometimes in buildings on the historic registry. They REALLY want to be able to use that existing infrastructure to deliver a high speed connection.

Re:Erm....?

[Sj0]

You make an interesting point that I hadn't thought of before.

Are phone installations in such buildings generally 4-wire though? Since phones only use 2 wires, I've seen a lot of phone infastructure that only uses 2 wires...

Re:Erm....?

[Rojo^]

Actually, the other pair is for shielding and redundancy. If primary pair shorts, the Telecommunications techs can just switch the room to the other pair without having to run new drops. With thousands of tenants in student housing, as often as trouble tickets come in, not having to drop a new line into each room where there's a problem is a huge saver in productivity and response time.

Re:Erm....?

[GigsVT]

Uh, that's simply not correct. Analog phone is 2 wire, the audio signal is just superimposed over the DC bias, it's all done on two wires.

Re:Erm....?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh... no.

The other two lines are traditionally used for a second line (or something else, like this HPNA technology). Power is modulated over the first pair (red/green) along with the voice signal. Google will enlighten you. If you only have one phone line, the black/yellow pair is totally unused.

Want more proof? (Assuming you only have one phone line in your house) Go out to the box where the phone comes into your house and you'll see that the black/yellow pair are either not connected to anything at that end, or if you disconnect them your phones will still work fine.

Want even more proof? Many (single-line) phones have only two prongs in the RJ-12 jacks on them... how does that power get to the phone if it only has prongs for the red/green pair?

Re:Erm....?

[Bent Mind]

There are two wires used in standard telephone connections, red and green. The other two wires (yellow and black) were supposed to be for a second line. However, most installers just ground them. The reason that the phone works during a blackout is because phones are amazingly simple devices that don't require a lot of power. At least they don't until you add an LCD, amplified speaker, memory, or Linux. There is plenty of signal power on the line to power up to five phones in your home.

Re:Erm....?

[tylernt]

The other two wires are for power. Notice how the phone works during a blackout?

Er, no. Not anymore:

An RJ11 jack uses two of the six positions ... In the powered variation, Pins 2 and 5 (black and yellow) carry 24-volt, DC power. While the phone line itself supplies enough power for most telephone terminals, old telephone terminals with incandescent lights in them (such as the classic Western Electric Trimline) need more power than the phone line can supply. Typically, the power on Pins 2 and 5 comes from a transformer plugged into a wall near one jack, supplying power to all of the jacks in the house.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJ11%2C_RJ14%2C_RJ25

So even if you do have some ancient phone that needs juice on those wires, you have to plug something into wall power to get power into them. The phone company does not power them.

In 99.9% of modern installations, the 2nd yellow/black pair is Line 2.

Re:Erm....?

[tylernt]

There is plenty of signal power on the line to power up to five phones in your home.

Assuming each has an REN of 1.0, but now we're getting pedantic. ;)

Re:Erm....?

[Ucklak]

Isn't the ring signal 90 volts or something like that?

Re:Erm....?

[Sj0]

Many people have taken issue with your first comment, but let me take issue with the second, lest I simply parrot the masses.

The phone is actually a single massive loop, which is terminated at the phone company central office. When the phone is on the hook, a very high voltage DC potential just sits there. When the phone rings, the central office sends an AC voltage over the DC carrier wave, which actuates the ringers in the phones. When the phone is picked up, the mic and headphone piece close the DC circuit. The Central office then detects the current (Which is very small compared to the voltage because it's being sent through kilometers of phone line) and switches to "off hook" mode.

Now, the reason this is at all relevant is DSL signals also live on this set of lines. That's why you need to install line filters in your house. HOWEVER, the DSL line can't be a low resistance device like the telephone, or your phone would be off the hook whenever you plugged your DSL modem in. Since the DSL modem would have to be a high impedance device capable of sustaining the massive DC voltage mentioned earlier, I know that 24VDC wouldn't hurt a DSL modem, and even in the worst case scenario of a 120VAC line connected directly to the phone (and why exactly would phone connectors be so tiny, with so little protection from electrocution or short circuits, if a 120VAC line voltage was present?), I'm pretty sure the DSL modem still wouldn't care, since the phone ringing voltage is about 90VAC. Some day I'll have to grab an old DSL modem and test my theory regarding the 120VAC, but I don't need to regarding the 24VDC. The line voltage used to test whether a phone is off the hook or not is about twice that.

Re:Erm....?

[empaler]

Interestingly, my networking course covered that this afternoon.

Non, I just have to get up and be bright for day three in four hours, so I don't know why I'm on /.
Blerg.

Re:Erm....?

[hdparm]

You know that this post of yours was the one for breaking /. database, do you? Quite an achievement!

Re:Erm....?

[GigsVT]

The DC isn't that high voltage. Of course it's going to vary a lot based on real world conditions, but it's going to be around 48 volts. It's not enough to shock you from touching it.

A boon for twisted pair or coax

[Fubar411]

So this looks to matter mostly to those with 4-wire phone lines, with one pair used for telephone. I can dig it. I doubt that anyone would run new coax for networking in their house, but they might just luck into it from a previous owner.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[inKubus]

Yeah, but in old houses the phone wiring is often substandard, spliced together multiple times, aged insulation, dirty copper, etc. So this ideal transfer rate would probably require retrofit in most of the places that would use it. So, while you're at it, just retrofit to the standard Ethernet. Networking that is not Ethernet generally fails. Ethernet is a good standard, although it does leave some things to be desired especially over crappy cables and connections. But worst case you negotiate a lower rate such as 10Mbps and get a more reliable connection. If you need more than that, you shouldn't have a problem with pulling a few legs of CAT6 or "fibre". I mean, this is a HOME we're talking about; it's not that hard to pull 3 or 4 rooms of Cat 6. Might take an hour or 2......... And most new homes already have CAT6 to the wall with a central panel where you have cable, phone and the cat6 terminated. Then you can have your choice of phone, cable or network at any of the endpoints in each room.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[DaWorm666]

> ... you shouldn't have a problem with pulling a few legs of CAT6 or "fibre". I take it you don't actually live in a house, especially one with more than one floor? When you don't have a crawl space underneath, or an attic overhead, the only way to get the wire from place to place is rip out the wall, drill through the studs, and put the wall back up. Most people aren't going to do that if they can use another pair from the pre-installed phone wires. It certainly isn't "simple".

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[Fnkmaster]

Networking that is not Ethernet generally fails.

I disagree with this. Try HPNA 2.0, it does absolutely work, even with less than ideal wiring. It's far superior to powerline networking in that sense, which claims completely unrealistic bandwidth numbers.

You may be right that in a really old home with really crappy wiring, it wouldn't work as well, but I've used HPNA in a couple of apartments with absolutely no problems.

Of course, this is all 10Mbps HPNA 2.0, because no mainstream manufacturers have ever seen fit to support HPNA 3.0, so I don't know how well a higher bandwidth version of phoneline networking would hold up, and whether they'd be able to meet the numbers they are claiming in normal, non-laboratory environments.

Your suggestion that wiring up a home is "easy" is a strange one. I have no idea how to do this properly, and I've been the CTO of several software companies. You think even most tech saavy people can do this? You need to punch lots and lots of holes in the wall to thread those wires from one end of a home to another, then patch all those walls and repaint them to mint condition. This is not just a 1-2 hour deal unless you are going from one end of the room to another, in which case you'd not bother wiring it up anyway. Try to get a quote from a company to do this all properly, and it will cost you a couple grand.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[cheater512]

AUD $1,500 to wire up a house. We got it done a few weeks ago to replace our 11mbps wireless.
This is a big house too and the wires went from one side of the house to the other on both stories.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[Atlantis-Rising]

I had my house done a while ago with Cat-6; it didn't even cost 1500. (I helped, though, cutting cable, mostly, splicing the ends, and finding studs, but that's about it.) My major expense there was patching the walls back up so they looked NICE (which is harder than it looked- usually we just cut holes as large as the jack panels and dropped the stuff in through the ceiling space between walls, but in the basement we had to go through the air ducting and it was a pain in the ass to drill and seal that back up later).

It was very much worth it- I have a 16 port gigabit switch sitting in my wiring closet, and I can get gigabit access from any one of those fourteen gigabit-class jacks- the other sixteen or so are simply on 100 mbit, but that's because I don't use them- they're only for when I grab a laptop and bring it into, say, the kitchen.)

Secure, (well, MORE secure), extremely fast, and no wireless woes- it was one of the best investments I've ever made. Especially since, now that the infrastructure is all there, running new cables is a snap- you just tie the new cables onto the back of the old one, pull it through, and boom. (But I suggested, to future-proof, running dual cat-six cables to each jack, with one disconnected, for future expansion, so here's hoping if I need more speed later on I can just hook up my other cat six line.)

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[GigsVT]

, but in the basement we had to go through the air ducting

Ouch, hope you used plenum rated cable.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[cheater512]

Well our house was two story with many jacks on each story. It was rather difficult to wire.
One cable goes outside stapled to the bottom of a balcony for ~5m.

We got the electricians to do it along with some antenna coax, powerpoints and a few other things at the same time.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[PitaBred]

What I've ended up doing in that situation is making the hub room central, and then going up with all the feeds, and dropping them down the walls from the attic. It's a much longer cable run than you'd need if you came up through the floor, but it's the only way to do it without ripping out all the drywall and such. Ethernet cabling is low voltage, so you don't need junction boxes or anything even. It's not easy as the GP implies, but it's not necessarily as difficult as you imply, either. Just a few topper studs to drill through, and it's done.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[inKubus]

Or you do what the cable company does and run it all outside, with the 12" long 3/4 drill bit thru the house, pull cable, terminate, affix box, done. Just because you don't like getting your hands dirty doesn't mean it isn't easy or fast. So some company charges a few grand to do attic drops? Since you're a CTO you probably make enough money to get it done right, and that means Ethernet.

They've been doing networking over coax since the 70/80's with the old digital equipment broadband stuff (which is the origin of "broadband"). Again though in a typical home you are going to have any number of splices and splitters which will kill your TXRX until you wish you had pulled cat6 after all. Remember THICKWIRE? UGH.

And by "Networking that is not Ethernet generally fails." I mean fails commercially, which HPNA clearly has, and that from TFA will as well.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[DaWorm666]

With three floors, those drops can get very long. Longer than GigE can run on inexpensive cable. With older homes, there is always trouble running new wire.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[Fnkmaster]

Ummm, I live in a 26th floor apartment in Manhattan. So your proposal is irrelevant. I said "apartments" in my post. And yes, I have done the "drill through the wall" approach in an office/warehouse building before, and where it's possible, it's fairly easy.

Second, the floorplan here is long and winding, and wiring it up with ethernet would be quite a project. I was being rhetorical when I said "I have no idea how to do it" - I simply mean that it is non-trivial for a normal, basic, semi-handy guy to do it, not that I am clueless, effete or can't stand to get my hands dirty. It would require taking out floorboards in one place to run underneath the hallway, and then putting those 7-slat square floorboards back together again, piece by piece. And punching through and running wire through 5 separate long wall segments. I've discussed it with a guy who does wiring stuff and he confirmed that it would be a big pain in the ass.

And yes, thank you very much, I *could* afford to get it done properly. And if I had a week of free time (hahaha) I *could* do it myself, pain in the ass or no.

But there's no need to do any of this because HPNA does the job fantastically well and is a far cheaper, easier solution than wiring up a legacy home with ethernet. Which was my whole point in the first place.

New Service in my Area

[superpulpsicle]

320Mbps over coax!

319Mbps download and 1Mbps upload for $99.99 per month.

Re:New Service in my Area

[jamesshuang]

Lucky bastard.... Comcast will give me 319.7 and 312 kbps upload...


I wonder if they realize that there are many VALID uses of upload bandwidth, such as remote access? VNC works like crap at 312...

Re:New Service in my Area

[TheRaven64]

I wonder if sites like flickr will start to change this. Uploading a large 'photo album takes a long time, and I would have thought average customers would start noticing it soon.

Re:New Service in my Area

[Agripa]

The frequency division multiplexing used to divide the receive and transmit signals is easier to implement then the echo cancellation necessary when your transmit and receive bands are the same. If you are going to separate your transmit and receive spectrums, you might as well tailor them for the most common usage which is large downloads and small uploads.

Or Fiber to the Premisis?

[parvenu74]

Isn't Verizon installing fiber to the premises these days? And what about hybrid-fiber-coax, especially when accessing remote terminals in your neighborhood that have fiber connections back to the service provider (which is what my cable company does)?

Re:Or Fiber to the Premisis?

[DigiShaman]

All Cable providers in major US cities are hybrid-fiber-coax. Due to the bandwidth limitations on the coax segment from the fiber node to your house, the industry is going with "switched video" technology.

I know for a fact that as of a few months ago, Time Warner of Austin, TX completed the switched video migration...except for a few remote nodes. But I'm sure they've been migrated too.

Great but...

[Fnkmaster]

I can't even buy HPNA 2.0 hardware anymore. I use the old Netgear PE102 bridges to extend my ethernet across my Manhattan apartment and it is far and away the best technology for this. Wireless is great for using my laptop in the living room, but for my desktop in my bedroom it would suck - latency, intermittent interference, and the difficulty getting transmission through multiple structural walls in an apartment building make wireless useless for this purpose.

HPNA 2.0 is great, but is 1) only 10Mbps, so not so impressive for higher bandwidth file transmission within my apartment and 2) no longer supported by ANY manufacturer because they mistakenly think that there is no demand due to wifi.

802.11b/g/a serve a totally different and complementary purpose to HPNA, which is great for bridging more distant rooms in a house or apartment that would cost thousands to properly wire for ethernet. Two 100 dollar bridges do the trick beautifully.

Powerline networking sucks in comparison - it was way overhyped and actual throughput is usually a fraction of the advertised throughput, whereas HPNA 2.0 worked exactly as promised and the PE102 boxes I use are so reliable it's sick.

I would absolutely love to see even a 50 or 100 Mbps HPNA standard that some manufacturer will support!

Re:Great but...

[dacheng81]

I have been using HPNA2.0 ever since there were more than 1 computer at home, and I still use it. Buying new HPNA PCI cards were nearly impossible, and I didn't want to shell out hundreds of dollars to move to Powerline. Luckily I found it on eBay for something like $2 (plus reasonable shipping), so I got 4 more (1 for backup). HPNA is the only reason I haven't started using Linux (there simply isn't much support, if at all, and definitely no "out-of-the-box" support). Nobody supports HPNA anymore. If anyone know how to fix the Linux/HPNA problem (both USB and PCI), please respond.

Re:Great but...

[Anti_Climax]

If you really need HPNA bridges there are tons of cheap 2Wire gateways on ebay. Put them in bridge mode and lock the line pair you want to use. If you're using DSL, lock it to the pair that's not being used. Sure they're big, but they're readily available and there's no driver required since they're bridging to ethernet.

Also, 2Wire has several gateway models with HPNA v3 and they'll no doubt adopt 3.1 soon enough.

Great, more alphabet soup

[Sheetrock]

Prey tell, how many different acronyms can we cram into networking -- MoCA, PNA, triple-play?

Ethernet and TCPIP are more than enough internet unless you're trying to make a sandwich.

GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[davidwr]

However, distance is severely limited. It works in a game-room just fine though.

I wouldn't recommend whole-house GigE with Cat5e. It might work, but only for a sufficiently small value of "house."

Re:GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[Heembo]

Are you new here? This is slashdot. I was required to have at LEAST a cat5e 5 user network in my house with a linux router (that I installed myself) running on a 486 or less before I was allowed to sign up!

Re:GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[cheater512]

Guess what I'm using right now. :)

Yep. Gigabit over Cat 5e. Our entire house is wired up with the stuff.
I've maxed it out at 60MB/s before my CPU hit 100%.

Its not a small house either. The strech of cable my computer has to the server must be at least 10-15m long.
No packet loss, great ping and way too fast. :D

Re:GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[nixman99]

However, distance is severely limited. It works in a game-room just fine though. I wouldn't recommend whole-house GigE with Cat5e. It might work, but only for a sufficiently small value of "house."

For us commoners with houses under 4,050 m^2 (40,000 ft^2)*, cat5e works fine.


* numbers based on 90x45 meter single story house, centrally-located core switch/router, and 65% efficiency of cable pulls.

Re:GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[empaler]

486?! They really have started letting everyone in.
Was the demand at least SX?

Bleh. I'll get back to my C=116 and cry in the dark.

Re:GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[Large Green Mallard]

Back in my day we had turn the crankshaft to get the 6502 in our Apple I kits working.

Re:GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[Heembo]

Dude I'm all over it if you can show me a C16 Ethernet card! I can turn a c64 into a slow router, but a c16? Help!

Re:GigE works fine over Cat5E wiring

[empaler]

Maybe I was embellishing a teeny bit. A smidgeon?

All about the coax

[Kadin2048]

There's plenty of colleges that only have their internal phone lines the the rooms and are delivering internet connections via DSL technology from their closets. Schools with 2000 students on campus and sometimes in buildings on the historic registry. They REALLY want to be able to use that existing infrastructure to deliver a high speed connection.

Bingo. I remember that my college had coax strung all over the place, mostly installed in the 70s and 80s, when CATV was still considered cool. (Actually, they had enough hardware to play at being their own cable TV company; in addition to giving you broadcast stations, there were even some "campus TV" stations with original programming, a scrolling bulletin-board, and campus radio-over-TV channel. They even had upstream-broadcasting amplifiers, so you could plug into any outlet with a special converter and broadcast live to the entire campus. *sigh* That was cool.) Since it was being installed at a time when much new construction was going on, there are a lot of places where coax goes and more recent computer network cables don't. Pulling new cable is an expensive proposition, and I think there could be a sizable niche market for any technology that allowed reasonably fast computer networking over existing cable TV coax.

Re:All about the coax

[Anonymous Coward]

The pornographic implications of broadcast from anywhere on cable tv at a college are awesome.

Re:All about the coax

[loraksus]

I really have to wonder about the quality of the coax after all those years. I lived in a dorm built in 1980 and the coax was utter shit. Tons of noise on certain channels and even the "best quality" channels were pretty bad.

Running data over that would be "fun".

Stop confusing me..

[davygrvy]

I'm just pining for Verizon's FiOS and have it nearly tatooed on my pecker, so don't confuse with lamer copper.

I agree.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had 3 computers in my home using HPNA. One of the cards died recently and I just could not find any place selling them. So I had to lay down some RJ45 across the hallway just to remain connected. I tried wireless before I went with HPNA; it just wasn't good enough. My home is rather large, and no matter what the signal was going to have to go through at least 3 walls and a large room full of electronics to cover everyone. The signal did not make it through. Even going through just one wall to the next room, the signal dropped to about 85%. HPNA is the most practical answer for most home networking: all of your rooms are already wired for telephones! The best solution is obviously to just wire everything up with RJ45, but that is just not practical. HPNA makes the best use of existing technology.

Oh, you have a BASEMENT

[PRMan]

In California, we have a word for BASEMENT. It's: CONCRETE SLAB.

No attic, either. It's VERY hard to do that sort of thing here.

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[modemboy]

Because of the way the POTS transmits. It takes 8000 samples per second of 8 bits, thus providing 64,000 bits of info, minus overhead you get 56k (53k).
DSL and this use a different encoding scheme on the data using more modern techniques such as Frequency Division Multiplexing. Also I believe local loops have more bandwidth on the local loop, the lower rate for telephones was implemented for long distance hauls.
So while POTS is limited to 56k it has nothing to do with the wire, it has to do with the telephone network equipment.

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[modemboy]

Because of the way the POTS transmits. It takes 8000 samples per second of 8 bits, thus providing 64,000 bits of info, minus overhead you get 56k (53k).
DSL and this use a different encoding scheme on the data using more modern techniques such as Frequency Division Multiplexing. Also I believe local loops have more bandwidth on the local loop, the lower rate for telephones was implemented for long distance hauls.
So while POTS is limited to 56k it has nothing to do with the wire, it has to do with the telephone network equipment.
And slashdot sucks at keeping track of threads...

Re:UWB over coax

[HoshiToshi9000]

http://www.pulse-link.com/pr-oct16-2006.html

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[alx5000]

Shannon called, he left you a message:

R = B log2 ( 1 + SNR ) - channel capacity equation

Change B for 3Khz (approx.) and SNR for 45 dB (min, IIRC), and you'll get your R = 56kbps. If you can't get that much SNR, you'll have a slower bitrate.

If, OTOH, you increase SNR and, especially, bandwidth, you'll get a higher bitrate. Laws of physics aren't broken; modern systems just use higher frequencies and more bandwidth than 300-3400 Hz.

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[MoOsEb0y]

You're confusing 4 kHz of bandwidth with much wider bandwidths.

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[perthling]

53kbps is the maximum using analogue transmission

For coaxial...docsis?

[anethema]

Me and a friend run the cable company here up at big white, local kelowna ski hill. Anyone have any more info in this as it pertains to cable companies? I'd do the research myself but I'm off duty ;)

We have cable (rg6) run through every building up here, so maybe this would make a cheaper alternative to DOCSIS cable modems, to just put one in the basement, then some kind of HPNA switch/inserter?

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[nero4wolfe]

They are actually two separate issues.

Voice lines use a defined set of frequencies on the copper. There is a limit on what you can send/receive just using those frequencies.

DSL, HomePNA, etc. use different (higher) set of frequencies. These frequencies do not overlap with the voice frequencies. There are some disadvantages of course; telephone wires are typically relatively electrically noisy, so if you're trying to push large amount of data around you have to be able to handle the noise. The extra frequencies can interfer with some voice equipment; so you might have to add filters to protect (e.g. remove the non-voice frequencies) the voice equipment.

Voltages, colour codes ....

[RallyDriver]

The DC is 24V, which is not high voltage in anyone's world. The ring signal is a bit more, IIRC 120V AC which I have gotten zapped by once :-) There were older phone switches (1970's) which did NOT provide the 24V DC power, and where a customer premises power supply was needed for outgoing calls.

An analogue phone line works entirely off the two wires, as many posters have noted the second pair is normally used for a second line, or is left open.

The red / black / green / yellow colour scheme is only used for endpoint cables (those silver ones) and, unusually compared ot other wiring standards, they actually flip over and pins 2-3-4-5 connect to 5-4-3-2 respectively.

Once you get into the real wiring, typically RJ-11 jacks in a building will be wired with the USOC code ... like most telco wiring codes, this is based on pairs; the insulation on each pair has a complementary colour scheme, where the first wire is mostly white and has a coloured dash, and its partner is mostly coloured and has a white dash.

For an RJ-11 phone line under the USOC scheme, pins 4&3 get "Wb/Bw" (white-blue, blue-white) and pins 2&5 (note the order) get the line 2 orange pair "Ow/Wo". Pins 1&6 get the green (if the cable provides a 3rd pair) or re left unconnected.

For ethernet (Cat 5, 5e, 6) schemes like 508-B they use four pairs, the 4th pair is brown. Only GigE and up uses more than 2 pairs.

In a trunk cable, there will typically be 40 pairs, carrying 40 customer lines ... once they use up all the main colours with white, IIUC the next batch of pairs are based on either grey or red.

Man,

[empaler]

This is all the info I should have had on the whiteboard today.

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[DigiShaman]

53kbps IS the maximum when working with an analog signal; and that's only if your download is comming from a digital source before your telco turns it back into analog... DSL however is not analog, it's digital. You can transmit far more data when it start and ends in the digital relm.

CATV

[Kadin2048]

Yeah. It was sadly underutilized at the time I was there. The possibilities truly should have been endless.

The system was very simply but elegantly designed, though. There was a single "head end" with the various pieces of source equipment for the different channels, and the main amplifiers, which fed down to distribution amplifiers in the buildings.

What was cool -- and I don't know if this exists in most cable systems or was just something exotic -- was that the amplifiers scattered through the system amplified most channels in the normal way, pushing them downstream. Except for a few channels, which weren't normally viewable on a TV -- I think they were called A1, A2 and A3. I think they were below CATV Channel 1, but I'm not sure. On those particular frequencies, the amplifiers would pass the signal back up the chain, towards the headend. At the headend was a receiver tuned to that frequency, which turned around and rebroadcast it out on a normal channel. (So if you injected into A1, it would come out on TV6, A2 on TV7, etc.)

So basically, you could go anywhere in the system with a special RF modulator, plug in a video and audio source, and start feeding video in, and it would be simulcast all over campus.

I really never had nearly as much fun with that as I should have.

IIRC, all the equipment in the system was made by Blonder-Tongue.

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[chris234]

Well, because DSL doesn't use phone lines. Oh, sure, it uses the same wiring, but it's not a phone connection like an analog modem uses.

Since when...

[TerovThePyro]

has triple-play been an acronym? Terribly Rich Internet Providers Looking Extremely - Peculiarly Locust-like At Your (money?)

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[poopdeville]

Modems could only use 53kbps (or whatever it was) because the modems were actually using the telephone line to communicate. That is, they were making noises for other modems to listen to. The phone system wasn't set up for high fidelity audio transmissions. If I remember right, the high end cut off frequency was 8 kHz. (For a bandwidth that amounts to about 7 kHz). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist-Shannon_sampl ing_theoremNyquist's Theorem explains the low data rate.

DSL modems use much higher frequency ranges, and proportionally larger band widths (probably on the order of megahertz) so Nyquist yields more throughput.

FYI, Nyquist's theorem is what links (the conceptually different) bandwidth and throughput.

Solution without a problem.

[Medievalist]

In most cases you can either run wiring for 100bT (GigE if you have broadband) or set up a wireless net that will give you acceptable performance for less effort. Because standard equipment has a titanic installed base, it is broadly available, cheap, mature, and will be supported for a long time.

This HomePNA stuff is niche-market, because almost nobody has a problem that can't already be solved with cheap existing technology. That means it will never enjoy the broad support that the mass-market technology has. So, long term, even the niches where it fits would probably be better off expending the labor to put in modern wires.

My house was built before 1840 and I wired it for GigE at a total cost of... Nothing. That's right, I got all the equipment and cabling from dumpster-diving. Standardized networking tackle is so incredibly widely available you can find it in dumpsters in any corporate office park. I decided to buy a set of used conduit benders off eBay when I linked in the barn, so that cost about $50. My wireless A/B (no G or N yet) also cost nothing, I got the APs from a buddy who bought into G (and is now pining for N). So, I have total coverage on my property for nothing but some sweat and about $100 for tools that I can use for other jobs.

When it comes to home networking...

[GWBasic]

When it comes to home (as opposed to office, dorm, high-performence) networking, cheap & easy is what'll win. I can forsee that the typical domestic home will choose networking over their powerlines. A "professional" installation might entail replacing the breaker box, with no need to run any wire at all.

Granted, home networking might use a bit of ethernet in places where it's desirable to have a high speed connection, but let's face it... The internet-enabled rice-cooker doesn't need to plug into two ports!

Nice one!

[otis wildflower]

Your comment ID indicates that you broke /.! gratz!

Re:Then why only 53kbps for dial-up?

[empaler]

It's because the modem works within the PSTN specs - basically, it's shouting back and forth. Oldskool analog, like a record player
Now we've got Laser Discs, xDSL. Occupies the same space, but in a very different way, and all digital.