Testing, testing: Asoka tools help HomePlug installers
The overwhelming majority of home wiring is perfectly suitable as a conduit for IPTV in a HomePlug network. When it isn’t, however, carriers are at a loss to say why and the homeowners are annoyed that the carriers can’t correctly install a home network.
“They (carriers) don’t have tools that provide them with the diagnostic capabilities for a reliable network,” said Elsa Chan, director of business development for HomePlug technology vendor Asoka USA. “We came out with a tool that provides them an understanding of the wiring in the home and the delivery of the service … information on not only bandwidth (but) packet loss, jitter, latency and a lot of information that that lets them understand why there’s pixelization happening.”
The toolset, priced at US$600 and available late in the first quarter of 2008, includes three adapters and a CD. It helps an installer diagnose whether a problem is with an individual outlet and can be resolved by moving to another spot; whether nearby noisy appliances are creating a problem and can be filtered; or if the home wiring is bad and the homeowner needs an electrician.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time in the deployments we’re seeing today—and we have hundreds of thousands of IPTV deployments running today with our technology (with AT&T and Bell Canada, among others)—it just works; you plug it in and it works,” said Dano Ybarra, Asoka’s CEO. “This is for that one percent of the time when you plug it in and something’s wrong. Rather than just walking away, they can figure out what is wrong.”