Home Grid Forum, Broadband Forum to collaborate on G.hn interoperability

It has been only days since the ITU officially accepted the G.hn home networking standard, but now the HomeGrid Forum, a major advocate of the new standard, believes that by partnering with The Broadband Forum it will be able to accelerate industry adoption of the standard.

Through this collaboration, the two forums will jointly develop a compliance and interoperability testing program for G.hn-based products. These products could potentially include entertainment (STBs and home gateways), home automation and security, and smart energy devices (thermostats and lighting systems). In addition, The Broadband Forum will support HomeGrid Forum's G.hn product validation, promoting product conformance and interoperability, and accelerate the time to market release HomeGrid Forum Certified products.

While G.hn has become a topic debate amongst competing no new wires home networking groups--particularly Home Plug and Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) which just released its 2.0 specification--G.hn's promise lies in its ability to run applications over any home wire (coax, phone lines and power lines).

With eight silicon vendors already supporting the G.hn standard, Matt Theall, president of the Home Grid Forum said that "manufacturers will bring the first G.hn silicon to market later this year, and introduce G.hn-based systems in early 2011."

Regardless of G.hn's proposed claims, service providers remain divided in their no-new-wires approach. On one hand AT&T (NYSE: T) and BT (NYSE: BT) have endorsed the G.hn standard, while Verizon and obviously the cable MSOs (Comcast, Charter and Time Warner Cable) have made MoCA their home networking wiring choice.

For more:
- see the release here

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