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The HomePNA Alliance (formerly the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance, also known as HPNA) is an incorporated
non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...
industry association of companies that develops and standardizes technology for
home network Home Network is a Television in Canada, Canadian English-language Discretionary service, discretionary cable television, cable and satellite television, satellite specialty channel owned by Corus Entertainment. Home Network broadcasts programs r ...
ing over the existing
coaxial cable Coaxial cable, or coax (pronounced ), is a type of electrical cable consisting of an inner Electrical conductor, conductor surrounded by a concentric conducting Electromagnetic shielding, shield, with the two separated by a dielectric (Insulat ...
s and telephone wiring within homes, so new wires do not need to be installed. HomePNA creates industry specifications which it then standardizes under the
International Telecommunication Union The International Telecommunication Union (ITU)In the other common languages of the ITU: * * is a list of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information ...
(ITU) standards body. HomePNA was developed for entertainment applications such as
IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV), also called TV over broadband, is the service delivery of television over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Usually sold and run by a Telephone company, telecom provider, it consists of broadcast live telev ...
which require good
quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...
(QoS). HomePNA promoter companies are AT&T Inc.,
Technicolor SA Vantiva SA (formerly Technicolor SA, Thomson SARL, Thomson SA, and Thomson Multimedia) is a French multinational corporation that provides technology products and services for the communication, media and entertainment industries. Headquarter ...
,
Pace plc Pace plc was a British company which developed set-top boxes (STBs), advanced residential gateways, software and services for the pay-TV and broadband services industry. Pace's customers included cable, telco, satellite and IPTV operators. T ...
, Sigma Designs,
Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...
,
Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...
, Sunrise Telecom and K-Micro.


History

HomePNA 1.0 technology was developed by Tut Systems in the 1990s. The original protocols used balanced pair telephone wire. HomePNA 2.0 was developed by Epigram and was approved by the ITU as Recommendations G.9951, G.9952 and G.9953. HomePNA 3.0 was developed by
Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American multinational corporation, multinational designer, developer, manufacturer, and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data cen ...
(which had purchased Epigram) and Coppergate Communications and was approved by the ITU as Recommendation G.9954 in February 2005. HomePNA 3.1 was developed by Coppergate Communications and was approved by the ITU as Recommendation G.9954 in January 2007. HomePNA 3.1 added
Ethernet over coax Ethernet over Coax (EoC) is a family of technologies that supports the transmission of Ethernet frames over coaxial cable. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) maintains all official Ethernet standards in the IEEE 802 fa ...
. HomePNA 3.1 uses frequencies above those used for
digital subscriber line Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric dig ...
and analog voice calls over phone wires and below those used for broadcast and
direct-broadcast satellite Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location.ITU Radio Regulations, Section IV. Radio Stations and Systems ...
TV over coax, so it can coexist with those services on the same wires. In March 2009, HomePNA announced a liaison agreement with the HomeGrid Forum to promote the ITU-T
G.hn Gigabit Home Networking (G.hn) is a specification for wired home networking that supports speeds up to 2 Gbit/s and operates over four types of legacy wires: telephone wiring, Coaxial cable, coaxial cables, Power line, power lines and pla ...
wired home networking standard. In May 2013 the HomePNA alliance merged with the HomeGrid Forum.


Technical characteristics

HomePNA uses
frequency-division multiplexing In telecommunications, frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) is a technique by which the total bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth available in a communication channel, communication medium is divided into a series of non-overlapping freque ...
(FDM), which uses different frequencies for voice and data on the same wires without interfering with each other. A standard phone line has enough room to support voice, high-speed DSL and a landline phone. Two custom chips designed using the HPNA specifications were developed by Broadcom: the 4100 chip can send and receive signals over 1,000 ft (305 m) on a typical phone line. The larger 4210 controller chip strips away noise and passes data on. A HomePNA setup would include a HomePNA card or external adapter for each computer, an external adapter, cables, and software. A
low-pass filter A low-pass filter is a filter that passes signals with a frequency lower than a selected cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies higher than the cutoff frequency. The exact frequency response of the filter depends on the filt ...
may be needed between any phones and their respective jacks to block noise. HomePNA adapters come in PCI,
USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...
, and
PC Card PC Card is a technical standard specifying an expansion card interface for laptops and personal digital assistants, PDAs. The PCMCIA originally introduced the 16-bit Industry Standard Architecture, ISA-based PCMCIA Card in 1990, but renamed it to ...
formats.


Alternatives

Alternatives to HomePNA include
power line communication Power-line communication (PLC) is the carrying of data on a conductor (the ''power-line carrier'') that is also used simultaneously for AC electric power transmission or electric power distribution to consumers. A wide range of power-line comm ...
,
Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...
, data over cable, and multimedia over coax.


See also

* * *


References


External links


ITU-T Recommendation G.9951 : Phoneline networking transceivers - Foundation
(HomePNA 2.0)
ITU-T Recommendation G.9952 : Phoneline networking transceivers - Payload format and link layer requirements
(HomePNA 2.0)
ITU-T Recommendation G.9953 : Phoneline networking transceivers - Isolation function
(HomePNA 2.0)
ITU-T Recommendation G.9954 : Phoneline networking transceivers - Enhanced physical, media access, and link layer specifications
(HomePNA 3.0 and 3.1)
ITU-T Recommendations: Series G
{{Home automation Computer network organizations Local loop