CES: CopperGate revs up home network speeds
Even though it has no presence on show floor, CopperGate Communications is using this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to introduce the latest, fastest version of its CopperStream HomePNA chipset.
“We have a meeting room (because) we don’t want to attract (show floor) walk-ups,” said Rich Nesin, vice president of marketing at CopperGate. “It just gives us a place to meet with our customers.”
In this case the customers are other equipment manufacturers who, at the request of service providers, add the CopperGate silicon to their products. The service providers, in turn, want the higher data throughput “to carry more streams and just to buy them more margin in their networks,” said Nesin. “They want to have a very robust network, which is why they’re using existing wires and not wireless and why they’re focusing on the coax and phone wires … so they can deliver a couple HD streams anywhere in the house while still supporting a number of SD streams.”
CopperGate is committed to HPNA—in this case HPNA 3.1— because it’s biggest customer, AT&T uses it, Nesin said.
“It’s our belief that the HomePNA is being picked up by an awful lot of telephone companies. In North America it’s basically the standard for the telephone companies because AT&T picked it,” he said.
Verizon, which is using MoCA is “not IPTV,” Nesin emphasized. “AT&T brought up a true IPTV system and we’ve worked for years with them debugging all the features, the fast channel change and everything else, getting them ready for their deployment so it’s a much easier sell to the other telephone companies.”
It’s also an easier sell to the OEMs that include the chipsets in their products because the service providers back it, he said.
“It got into their (service providers) RFIs and their RFPs and then it got into their products … and they pushed it to the OEMs who were anxious to put any good home network technology in their boxes that the customers wanted,” he said.
The latest version, with headroom included, delivers up to 240 Mbps of data throughput and is fully compatible with CopperGate’s previous generations of products.
“They just connect us to an existing port on the set-top box and our chips are the entire HomePNA 3.1 modem,” he said.