Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Tools

Industry Consortium Launches HomeGrid Forum



Infineon Technologies, Intel, Panasonic, and Texas Instruments have launched the HomeGrid Forum, an organization aimed at promoting and a worldwide standard for networking digital content, such as movies, music, and pictures, over home wiring.

The Forum will be a companion to ITU-T G.hn working group, supporting the interests of service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers, PC OEMs, and other networking companies to create a single MAC and PHY protocol for transporting multimedia across a home's existing wiring to include coaxial cable, power lines and phone lines. HomeGrid Forum is contributing next-generation technology requirements to ITU-T G.hn, quickly developing consensus around one worldwide standard. ITU-T is the standardization sector providing global telecommunication standards in the International Telecommunication Union.

"HomeGrid Forum was created to support the development of a single standard for transmitting multimedia over coax, power and phone lines," said Matthew Theall, president of HomeGrid Forum. "The forum will promote HomeGrid-certified products and ensure interoperability."

"A single, unified technology for multimedia networks over power lines, coaxial cable, and phone lines has the potential to enable a simple, easy-to-use means of networking devices together in the home," said Kurt Scherf, analyst with market analyst firm Parks Associates. "We believe today's announcement is an important step towards eliminating fragmentation in the industry, and achieving the vision of a networked home."

Three work groups have been established:

  • An ITU-T G.hn contribution work group
  • A compliance and interoperability work group to ensure that any product with a HomeGrid logo will work reliably in customers' homes
  • A marketing work group to promote HomeGrid-certified products worldwide.

HomeGrid Forum has 11 founding members. Infineon, Intel, Panasonic, and Texas Instruments will serve on the board of directors. Aware, DS2, Gigle Semiconductor, and Pulse~LINK will serve as promoters; and Ikanos Communications, Sigma Designs. and Westell will serve as contributors.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.