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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.'"
In my experience with such networks, its not the transfer speed but the response time that makes you want to chew your keyboard.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"What was wrong with gigabit ethernet?"
It requires CAT-6e certified twisted pair cables and wont run over existing house wiring.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
320Mbps over coax!
319Mbps download and 1Mbps upload for $99.99 per month.
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)?
What was wrong with gigabit ethernet?
Each run being limited to a length of 100 meters?
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
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.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
What's wrong with my 10 gigabit ethernet? ( via my Intel PCI Express 10GbE CX4 cards).
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.
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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!
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."
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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.
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> ... 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".
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.
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.
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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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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?
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.
It's been a long time.
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/