- Virgin Media, Kabel Deutschland BSkyB May Be Next for Entropic’s MoCA Chips
The perceived European opportunity for MoCA has improved from a few years ago when the experts were saying that a coax-based network would not find any takers there. Most significantly, Liberty Global’s UPC Broadband, Europe’s largest cableco, will have Entropic’s MoCA chips in its next generation Horizon DVR/STBs that also includes OTT services. The first deployments will be in its Dutch cableco.
We expect the UK’s Virgin Media, Europe’s second largest cableco, to announce that it will also go the MoCA route. There are rumors that the UK satco BSkyB (the one that Rupert Murdoch was trying to buy all of) may also go MoCA.
Liberty Global operates cablecos in Germany (Unitymedia), Austria, Belgium (Telenet), Switzerland (Cablecom), Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
At IBC, Entropic’s VP of Technology Dr Anton Monk said research by IHS Screen Digest found that of the 30% of European homes with a cable TV service, many had as many as three coaxial outlets and that makes a MoCA network feasible. Monk also said that satellite TV companies have installed some coax, at least from their antenna to the STB.
The Horizon boxes also have Celeno’s video-maximized Wi-Fi chips, showing perhaps that there are not enough rooms in European homes with coax to make coax the sole means for delivering video to every room. The trend, although it’s a bit early to be making predictions, is that in Europe at least, STBs will have both MoCA and Wi-Fi that is HD video capable like Celeno’s.
A major factor that makes Wi-Fi mandatory is that pay TV services are hurrying to get their content displayed on tablets, which makes Wi-Fi a must in the STB. Many of them also want to support tablets via Wi-Fi for consumers to use to chat with friends and/or the show’s stars while watching on the telly.
A compelling factor in MoCA’s favor is the approaching availability of MoCA 2.0. It is fighting off in-roads by HomePlug and HomeGrid (G.hn) with MoCA 2.0’s higher speeds — 400 Mbps compared to MoCA 1.1’s 175 Mbps. With channel bonding MoCA 2.0 will be able to achieve speeds up to 1 Gbps. The pay TV services do not want the home network to be the slowest link in the food chain when they start deploying broadband speeds of 100 Mbps and greater. Let us not ask why consumers need all that speed because the available broadband speed has always been filled by higher definition videos and apps such as video calls, telemedicine and telelearning.
The pay TV services are doing everything they can to avoid installing new wires and if that includes using advanced forms of Wi-Fi, so be it. The industry is already developing P1905 that will serve as a bridge between Wi-Fi and wireline networks.
Consumer demand for whole-home DVRs is ramping up the need for faster home networks to carry multiple streams of HD video to more rooms. The fallback from MoCA where coax is not available has been to HomePlug over powerline. However, Telefonica’s sponsorship of G.hn’s first certification tests and a request for quote from AT&T for a G.hn-capable STB seems to indicate the telcos are leaning towards G.hn instead of HomePlug and MoCA. A large Chinese telco, probably China Telecom, is also said to be testing G.hn.
There are exceptions. Verizon, the US’ second largest telco, was the first to deploy MoCA on a large scale and is unlikely to switch. The service providers’ cost of changing home network technologies is very high and they will only consider changing if the benefits are overwhelming.
Monk says that powerline home networking won’t do the job in many cases because it doesn’t have the bandwidth. He said four HD streams plus data amount to over 100 Mbps of net throughput but the average net data rate for powerline is only 30 Mbps. That statement is confirmed as HomePlug chipmakers like Qualcomm Atheros and Sigma Designs race to improve HomePlug’s performance — more outlets with a higher percentage of the potential bandwidth.
There are two other complicating factors in the home network market:
1. HomePNA (HPNA). Telcos like AT&T that are deploying HPNA are happy to hear that HPNA chipmaker Sigma Designs has committed to producing a chipset that supports both HPNA and HomeGrid. That means that installation and service trucks will be able to carry one STB and router that supports either, reducing the telcos’ inventory costs.
2. P1905. It’s apparent that Wi-Fi and wireline home networking have to meld. P1905 is an IEEE effort to create bridges between HomePlug AV, MoCA, Ethernet and Wi-Fi to make it easier to install and configure a home network where Wi-Fi and a wireline scheme are both needed. HomeGrid was omitted, purposely some say, but the two major HomeGrid chipmakers we’ve talked to, Sigma Designs and Marvell, both say they will also develop P1905 bridges for HomeGrid.
Entropic has increased its marketing activities in Europe although the pay TV services do not buy MoCA chips directly. Having landed Liberty Global, Virgin Media, UK satco BSkyB and Kabel Deutschland are expected to be three of MoCA’s target accounts. None has made a public announcement but no one will be surprised if and when they go MoCA for their whole-home DVRs that go in the living room and the less expensive remote STBs that go in other rooms.
We also wouldn’t be surprised to see the DVRs include a video-maximized Wi-Fi like Celeno’s, which is exactly what UPC did with its Horizon boxes.
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