P1905 Venture to Help Sales of MoCA, HomePlug Devices

From The Online Reporter   

In-Stat said research shows that the P1905 effort to “unify” HomePlug, MoCA, Wi-Fi and Ethernet will help the sales growth of HomePlug and MoCA devices. 

Vahid Dejwakh, In-Stat analyst, expects that HomePlug will come embedded in CE devices in North America and Europe around late 2013, which will certainly increase HomePlug’s installed base very quickly. That’s especially true in Europe where the telcos rather than the cablecos appear to be the dominant pay-TV company. 

A spokesman for a HomeGrid (G.hn) member has said he too expects to have HomeGrid embedded in CE devices. 

MoCA owns the US pay-TV market with the exception of AT&T and a number of smaller telcos. Verizon was the first major MoCA user. 

Dejwakh said, “We expect the European region to remain the main target market for HomePlug products, though Asia Pacific will see the highest growth rate over the next five years.” The Chinese market for home networking is only now emerging. China has very little coax and could become an interesting battleground for HomePlug and HomeGrid players. 

Three things are not yet known that will influence the fight between HomeGrid and the MoCA/HomePlug alliance:

 - HomeGrid is not yet in field trials that we know of and its claimed superiority over HomePlug is not yet field proven. 

 - Adding Wi-Fi to HomePlug and MoCA with the P1905 effort could provide them with a wireless advantage — an all-in-one chipset. 

 - The super Wi-Fi chips that Quantenna and Broadcom are producing may negate much of the wireline sales pitch, although it’s too early to see whether the studios and networks will trust wireless to carry their water. Motorola is going to use Quantenna chips in an STB that’s to be available this fall and STB maker Airties is using similar Wi-Fi chips that Broadcom makes.

In-Stat says HomePlug will have shipped 30 million devices by 2014. Worldwide, it said, over 40 million wired home networking nodes shipped in 2010 and Home-Plug node shipments make up 50% of all nodes shipped. The main providers will be Atheros, Entropic, Sigma Designs and Broadcom, it said. 

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