G.hn gains standardization steam, more carrier support

The International Telecommunications Union's Telecom standards group, the ITU-T, has announced further progress on the G.hn home network standard. Meanwhile, another service provider, BT, has joined G.hn trade group the HomeGrid Forum, and fellow G.hn proponent AT&T said it likes the potential for G.hn to become the basis for managed services inside the broadband home.

After reaching agreement on G.hn's physical layer network architecture late last year, the ITU-T now has approved elements of the Data Link Layer of the standard as "Baseline Text," according to Converge Digest, a move which the ITU-T described as another key step toward a full standard. It also gives companies more information to act on as they develop commercial G.hn products.

As for BT's membership in the HomeGrid Forum, the carrier joins AT&T, Qwest Communications, France Telecom and other service providers in the effort. And in a Telephony story, AT&T notes that it likes G.hn for its ability to support managed broadband services in the home. In that sense G.hn will continue the move by broadband service providers to work more closely with residential customers as a sort of IT department for networked households.

For more:
- Converge Network Digest has this story [1] on the standard
- Telephony covers [2] AT&T's comments

Related articles
The G.hn physical layer consent occurred last December [3]
The HomeGrid Forum started up about one year ago [4]