Top 10 Hang-Ups In Home Networking
A few data points provide a snapshot of the opportunities. Market watcher iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) predicts shipments of products with integrated wired home networking will rise by more than a factor of 10 in the next four years, to hit 223.8 million units in 2010. Parks Associates estimates the number of North American homes with networked digital-video recorders more than tripled from 400,000 in 2005 to 1.7 million by the end of 2006.
But there are no easy pickings in this gold rush. Engineers face historic levels of complexity building the digital home for several reasons. An unprecedented number of players are competing for a piece of the action. Coordination between these would-be architects is minimal.
What's more, the stakes are high. Consumers expect both top notch quality and ease of use. Imagine routing high definition video streams among various set-tops, players and TV screens without dropping a frame or frustrating Joe Viewer who is trying to fire up HD versions of the Super Bowl for his buddies in the living room and "Toy Story" for the kids in the den.
"There's a huge set of things engineers have to put in place--digital rights management, media formats--and you have to have all the pieces implemented before the content flows," said Brendan Traw, chief technology officer of Intel's digital home group. "If any piece of the puzzle is not present, it doesn't work," he said in our preview of the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.
The ultimate solution could require a realignment of the consumer industry from vertically oriented companies to a more horizontal structure in which different companies handle different pieces of the problem. That would make the consumer sector look more like the computer industry, said Mike Buckley, a director at Intel Capital, which manages a $200 million consumer fund.
So for anyone who may have missed some of the many stories we've been writing about the opportunities and pitfalls building the digital home, here's our list of the top ten hang ups in home networking.It's easy enough to show home networks are still too complicated—just try them sometime. The analysts and even the industry players know that's true.
"The glue that holds all this together is home networking, and it stinks," said Van Baker, a consumer analyst with Gartner Dataquest, in an early 2006 story. "If home networking stays like it is, it will stall at 30 percent penetration," he said.
"We've all dealt with that rat's nest of wire behind our home entertainment centers," said Bruce Watkins, president and COO of Pulse-Link Inc. (San Diego) in the same article.
Pulse-Link is one of several companies that joined the High Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance (HANA) to create guidelines making it easier to link TVs, digital recorders, and storage devices via a single IEEE 1394 cable. The group debuted in late 2005 promising systems will emerge using its approach in 2007.
Another Gartner consumer analyst, Jon Erensen, summed up the situation succinctly in a December 2006 briefing in San Jose. "There are a lot of solutions out there, but not the real interoperability you need for wired and portable products across multiple vendors," he said.The problem is not that there is a lack of mechanisms to ensure what's called quality-of-service (QoS) on the home network. To the contrary, there are too many of them.
"Everybody has a different notion of what QoS should be, but if you've got more than one QoS, you haven't got any," said Glen Stone, a director of strategy, standards and architecture for Sony Electronics.
We explored this topic in a November story and found the problem is many players see the capability of delivering multimedia over a home net as a competitive advantage or core competency. "They fundamentally want to have control over QoS in the home net because if something goes wrong people will call them for support," said Stone.
Problems only get worse with the move to high definition TVs and DVDs. "We are focused on the HD experience, and that content really exacerbates the QoS issue," said Gary O'Neall, vice president of global set-top development for Motorola.
Two groups are doing some fundamental work in this area. The Universal Plug and Play Forum is tackling the issue from a high-level software perspective. Meanwhile the 802.1 Audio/Video Bridging Task Group is trying to make changes in silicon for QoS.
Two other groups may leverage their work. The Home Gateway Initiative represents telcos and their suppliers, and Cable Labs handles R&D in areas including home networking for the cable TV industry.Despite the rise of 802.11n broadband wireless links in 2007, Wi-Fi will be no panacea for the digital home, we concluded in our preview for the 2007 CES.
Other wired and wireless solutions will come on strong this year. They include coax-based approaches from the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) and Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HPNA), the powerline-based HomePlug 2.0 and various flavors of ultrawideband.
HPNA leapfrogged its competition in throughput in November, announcing a version 3.1 spec with an aggregate 320 Mbits/second over two simultaneous channels. But MoCA officials say cable TV suppliers will come out supporting their approach in 2007. We profiled the competition among these and other players in a January 2006 story.
"11n will make streaming audio better and video possible—-as long as you are not using your microwave--but I still think the digital home will be a heterogeneous environment and no one physical layer will win," said Scott Smyers, vice president of network systems architecture at Sony Electronics Inc. and chairman of the Digital Living Network Alliance.
The service providers are calling the shots in home networking for set-top box makers such as the Scientific Atlanta group of Cisco that sees itself as agnostic, said Dave Davies, vice president of strategy and product marketing for SA's digital set-tops.
"The cable operators are more interested in MoCA, the telcos focus on MoCA and HPNA-over-coax and others are thinking about HomePlug, so we'll see multiple flavors of home networks in 2007," said Davies.
Service providers see wireless as expensive, insecure and unreliable. They fear costly service calls due to routine interference as well as thefts of service from apartment owners picking up a neighbor's wireless TV signals. Thus SA has no plans to integrate any wireless networking in its set-tops in 2007, though it does already sell Wi-Fi peripherals that attach to them via USB.
"I personally see wired nets taking off in 2007. They will definitely start shipping in volume, but no one will be in the tens of millions for the next couple years," said John Hussey vice president of the high-speed signal processing group at Analog Devices Inc.Life isn't any easier for those who just want to add a little intelligence to managing their lights, security and HVAC systems. There are at least three new and three traditional approaches to handling home automation with plenty of companies backing each camp.
Our Embedded.com online editor Bernie Cole laid out the fundamentals in a forward-looking article way back in 1999. Cole said any home net needs to be simple, low cost and not require new wiring in his profile that included a look at CEBus, X-10, LonWorks and more.
More recently, much of the home and industrial-control buzz has centered around Zigbee. The open spec got an update in 2006 supporting star and mesh topologies.
Before the ink dried on the first Zigbee spec, chip and software developer Zensys gathered more than 60 companies to form an alliance that will push for the adoption of Zensys' Z-Wave wireless protocol in the home automation market.
Before either of those alternatives got off the ground, Smarthome Inc., a large maker and retailer of home automation products, announced another option. Insteon is a hybrid power line/wireless networking technology that it claimed will fix the reliability problems of current X-10 home control networks while retaining backward compatibility with them. Analysts were cool on Insteon because it lacks the bandwidth and standards backing of Zigbee.Short-range personal-area networks (PANs) are every bit as fragmented as their counterparts that try to stretch across the entire home. The main underlying transport networks--Bluetooth and ultrawideband (UWB)—come in flavors with various protocols running on top of them.
We profiled the sector in a May story from the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) where Microsoft announced its plans to support WiNet, a form of Internet Protocol over UWB.
Cellphone makers are stirring the pot with their own PANs. Nokia rolled out in October Wibree, a low-power derivative of Bluetooth for links to toys and gadgets running on button-cell batteries. Handset companies are also pushing for near-field communications as a transport for electronic payments. How these mobile PANs will interact in the home network environment is still unclear.
"Right now, it's a mess," said Liam Quinn, chief technology officer for communications and peripherals at Dell Inc, speaking at WinHEC. "We are collectively doing a poor job articulating what is Bluetooth, ultrawideband and so on. If we can't do this as savvy technology people, how can users do it?"
The problem is that everyone has their favorite protocol, and developers differ on what they consider to be the best ideas for making it easy to associate nodes on an ad hoc wireless net. But systems have limited space for all the wide-, local- and personal-area radios and antennas that the new efforts are generating.
"At this point, nothing's clear. We will be six to eight months working through this," said Alec Gefrides, a wireless strategist for Intel Corp. "People are still putting up flags for new camps."The area of dedicated point-to-point connections between consumer systems is also seeing a rising tide of new options, potentially confusing and confounding both systems makers and their customers. Once again, the intensity is greatest at the high end among new options to handle the heady bandwidth requirements of high def video.
On the wired side, DisplayPort and the Unified Display Interface are vying to become the standard for a secure digital link in consumer systems and computers. The pair will compete against two digital interfaces already in use-- Digital Visual Interface and High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI).
We've ended up with a nightmare scenario of multiple standards. It's a frightening mess," said Bob O'Donnell, vice president of clients and displays at International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.). "The notion of a converged display interface may just go away," he said in a May report examining the conflict.
On the wireless side, startup SiBeam announced it has gathered an ad hoc consortium called WirelessHD around its approach using 60GHz radios to deliver up to 5 Gbits/second. It will compete with companies using ultrawideband to deliver 480 Mbits/s or more over an approach dubbed WirelessHDMI.
Then there are startups like Amimon doing proprietary twists with 802.11n to make it a high-def ready interconnect.
"It is completely unpredictable at this point whether one technology will win or not, but I don't think that will happen," said Craig Mathias, a wireless analyst at Farpoint Group.Home networks are built to carry both personal and paid-for content, like songs and movies. But there's no standard way to protect the so-called premium content from being copied and freely distributed.
A whole new category of mainly software security products is growing up around different digital rights management approaches (DRMs). According to our 2007 CES preview, most observers believe the industry will struggle with an increasing number of proprietary DRMs for a long time.
Many see Microsoft's Windows Media DRM gaining momentum as a de facto standard due to its broad use in PCs, a prospect some industry observers and consumer OEMs said they find "too frightening." Others are angry that Apple has not opened up the FairPlay DRM used in its wildly popular iPod.
Cable and satellite TV companies share some of the blame. They tend to want to have a single DRM as part of a closed end-to-end system.
That leaves the digital home with one DRM on their PC, another on their iPod and a third on their TV content—and none of them talk with each other.
Several groups are working on DRM standards including the cellphone-focused Open Mobile Alliance and the Europe based Digital Video Broadcasting Project. One of the most closely watched is the ad hoc Coral Consortium which has already released an initial specification for passing content between different DRMs. However none of the approaches have made their way into real products yet, and none have the cooperation of Microsoft and Apple for linking to mainstream PCs and iPods.
In addition, Intel is promoting Digital Transmission Content Protection over IP as a core standard for this area. The Digital Living Network Alliance has adopted DTCP-IP as a requirement and Windows Media DRM as an option as part of its first pass at a standard for content protection. Separately, Sun Microsystems has been promoting its concept for an open-source, royalty free DRM, or what it calls its Dream project in Sun Labs.
"We don't see much light at the end of this tunnel. There are efforts out there, but they aren't making much progress," said Van Baker, a consumer analyst for market watcher Gartner Dataquest. "Vendors are determined to monetize their own assets through proprietary technologies," he said in our preview of the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.Engineers had hoped they could concoct a variant of Linux for consumer electronics systems, providing an open platform that could lead to greater interoperability between systems on a home network. The operating system would need to support digital media, broadband networking, near real-time response and do that on an extremely low-cost and low-power budget.
As of our May story that covered this issue, developers have pretty much let go of that ambitious goal, settling instead for promoting as much collaboration around Linux as possible. Scott Smyers, a Sony executive who also chairs the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum, said the three-year old group has evolved from pursuing a common framework to providing a forum to share software components. "Over time, a common framework may emerge, but at every step there may be opportunities for differentiation," Smyers said. "For any one problem like power management there may be more than one open-source solution."
Intel Corp. is one of the few companies that has not given up hope. It tried to rally support for the desktop-oriented Linux Standard Base effort at a poorly attended session of the Intel Developer Forum earlier this year.
Linux Standard Base is a functional spec working at the library and command level--not at the kernel level--to act as an application portability standard for GNU/Linux. Intel called for developers to get involved in the definition of a version 4.0 now in the works.
An executive from Motorola's cell phone group expressed familiar frustrations with consumer Linux. The company made a commitment in 2005 to consolidating work on various software platforms to Linux as a free and open code base that does not depend on any third party for enabling new hardware. But the lack of a standard is its major drawback, said Christy Wyatt, vice president of third-party relations for Motorola.
Some fault chip companies such as Marvell and Broadcom that provide Linux stacks that are just a little different from those of their competitors so that OEMs are encouraged to stick with their chip sets. Microsoft shares some of the blame for making OEMs liable for any compromises of the Windows Media DRM, a legal technicality that scares some OEMs away from open-source Linux and into the arms of more tightly controlled RTOSes.Home networks are in such an early stage of development that even the interoperability efforts are still fragmented, we reported in a May article.
At least three major efforts are trying to address interoperability in the digital home—the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), the Universal Plug and Play Forum (UPnP) and Intel's Networked Media Product Requirements (NMPR). The programs are roughly coordinated, but have their gaps and areas of overlap.
Typically, DLNA adopts all the work of UPnP, which creates application programming interface standards so systems can work together over home nets. UPnP does endeavor to set new standards where there are none. Ultimately, DLNA aims to take the widest possible scope, filling in gaps left by UPnP and other groups.
Trying to nudge the pace of progress, Intel created its own suite of interoperability standards with NMPR. The effort was "a time-to-market play. A consensus process like DLNA takes longer than you might like," said Brendan Traw, chief technologist in Intel's digital home group.
China has kicked off a standards group called Intelligent Group and Resource Sharing Alliance that roughly parallel's the objectives of UPnP. The two groups have made efforts at to work together.
In addition to these broad efforts, there are a number of groups working on home net standards for specific constituencies. The Home Gateway Initiative represents telcos and their suppliers, Cable Labs handles R&D for the cable TV industry, the Open Mobile Alliance is focused on the cellular industry and the Digital Video Broadcasting Project has efforts for Europe's TV broadcasters, to name a few.
And finally,
10. There are too many cooks in the kitchen
Roll it all together and one big theme emerges: There are just too many loosely connected players in this rapidly growing field.
As we reported in our CES 2007 preview, it's a heady mix of players. They include Hollywood studios; cable and satellite TV providers; cellular carriers; traditional telcos; consumer, computer and communications OEMs; chip makers and more. Every player in every industry is looking for its own silver bullet " an optimal software/hardware platform that advantages its own content or devices and guarantees a piece of the action every time content shifts places or devices.
"The proliferation of formats and desire to interconnect everything ends up creating a mad scramble," said Bill Bucklen, a segment director for advanced TV at Analog Devices Inc.
The net result: The digital home will face technology fragmentation for some time to come, and that is its biggest hang up.