New IEEE P1905 standard may unite Europe's fragmented home networks

The entry of the IEEE , the world's largest technology standards body, into the TV home networking arena highlights the coming of age of this field, while also suggesting that more work is needed to deliver interoperability. The IEEE is developing a standard called P1905, which will be an abstraction layer allowing devices and services to work over any of the four main existing home physical communication technologies — HomePlug AV over power lines, MoCA over coaxial cable, Ethernet over Cat 5 twisted pair cable and Wi-Fi for wireless. It will enable a pay TV service to work over a hybrid home network comprising a mixture of two or more physical layers, such as Wi-Fi and power line, through common management and control. Indeed P1905 will completely shield video management software from the underlying physical connectivity and allow the network to operate seamlessly over multiple physical technologies. It will avoid the need for a gateway or an application to know what physical network it is operating over, bringing the four technologies together within a single abstraction layer interface and be capable of using whichever option is available or performs best at a particular time.

The emergence of P1905 with the weight of the IEEE behind it does beg the question of why another home networking standard is required when there seem to be so many already making some claim of universal interoperability. Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) was supposed to facilitate interoperability within the home, but that is more of a coalition, incorporating standards developed by other bodies as well as adding some new components, in particular for automated device and service discovery.

More pertinently, G.Hn appears to have the same goals, and the existence of P1905 does seem a rebuke to that initiative. The IEEE argues that P1905 addresses some deficiencies in G.Hn by operating at a higher level. G.Hn is a universal physical interface designed to integrate MoCA, HomePlug, Wi-Fi and Ethernet into a single physical network. The P1905 camp argues that there is no need for integration at the physical level and points out that G.Hn components would not be backwards compatible with existing MoCA, HomePlug or Wi-Fi ones. It also argues that G.Hn does not yield any performance improvements over MoCA and the other existing physical standards, and that it has come too late into the market to replace them with this umbrella interface.

There is also the more subtle argument that there is no need for a universal interface, since, in practice, a given home might have two separate networks operating in parallel but not connecting to each other at the physical level. There might be Wi-Fi in every room but served by a MoCA coaxial backbone for example. Therefore there is no need for coexistence at the physical level that G.Hn achieves, at least according to the P1905 argument.

Bogleheads :: View topic - Questions on wiring a house for cable ...

I had my modem on one output of a 6-way splitter provided by the cable company. One day, the modem stopped working because the signal strength received at the cable office was below specification and the modem was unable to compensate for the increased loss. The cable guy added a 2-way splitter before the 6-way splitter and rerouted the modem line to the 2-way splitter. The signal strength increased 6 dB which allowed the modem to function properly. The moral of this story is to wire and split so that you can get the maximum signal to the modem. My last house had all the cables run to a single box. I think there were seven. I had a four-way splitter. I had a modem and three tvs. When I moved a tv to another room, I went to my box and switched the cables that were connected to the splitter. At some point, I also had the modem problem. I added a 2-way splitter before the 4 way splitter and ran the modem off the 2-way. If you run your own wire, you will need to put the connectors on yourself, so you need the proper tools for that (pretty simple). The rooms had unterminated wires running to a point in the wall behind a solid wall plate. I like putting in the wall plates with connectors and running a separate cable to the tv rather than just running wire out of a hole in the wall, but that's just aesthetics. He said everything looked fine, but he always did this to save time and grief on a new install. It took him 5-10 minutes to re-terminate the 8-10 cables and install a couple of splitters and a filter for the cable modem. All the parts he used seemed like industrial quality compared to the Home Depot stuff I used. There was no extra charge for the do-over. The idea is that it takes a fire a couple of minutes to burn through drywall and into the structure of a home. During that time, the smoke alarms should go off and people should be able to get out. If the drywall layer is compromised and the flames can get inside the wall quicker, the fire will spread faster and you may lose valuable escape time. If you lack the skills or will in this area, another technology to consider in your mix is powerline networking, which uses the existing electrical wires. The latest version of this technology has top speeds of 500 Mps. Using the older 200 Mps technology, we get actual file copy speeds of 50 Mbs, probably faster than you'd get with 100 Mb etherent.

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