From The Online Reporter
- 2/3rds of Provincial Cablecos Using Its EoC Technology
- China Developing a New C-HomePlug AV Standard
The Chinese government has set a goal to provide 30 Mbps to every residence.
Qualcomm Atheros (QCA) has continued to maintain its leading market share in providing technology for Building Area Networks (BAN) over rivals Broadcom and Entropic, according to Alex Liu, the company’s staff manager of product marketing. He said that of the 30 or so Chinese provincial cablecos that are currently deploying, about two-thirds have opted for QCA’s IEEE 1901 compliant HomePlug AV-based EoC version.
QCA’s EoC chips are in the gear that various Chinese equipment makers produce for the cable TV industry.
We last talked to Liu about the matter in December 2011, as reported in the article “Qualcomm Atheros Lands 10 Major Chinese Cablecos.”
The technology the three chipmakers are selling is called EoC for Ethernet-over-Coax, but each has a different implementation. QCA’s EoC technology is based on HomePlug, but calling it HomePlug incorrectly sounds as if the electrical power lines are involved, and they are not. It’s strictly coax from a fiber termination point in the basement of or just outside an MDU to a gateway or set-top box in the residence.
Liu also said QCA is working with others on a new industry next-generation standard called 802.3bn that will treat a combination fiber-coax network as a single network.
Taking a global view of coax as compared to twisted-pair copper telephone wires, Liu said that telcos’ copper wires connect between 1.2 and 1.3 billion residences to networks. Coax has only about half as many:
Coax is a more efficient conductor of data, Liu said. It has 1 Ghz of capacity of usable spectrum, whereas copper telephone wires have only 30 megahertz, a 30 times difference. The total global capacity of coax, even with only half as many homes as copper, is 15 times greater. In an ideal world, every residence would have a fiber connection, but that is unlikely to happen, he said, because of the large installed base of copper and coax plus the cost of building all-fiber networks. However, he said, whenever a new network is built, it should be built with fiber.
The end result, Liu said, is that coax is “a rich spectral resource” that is still “under-utilized.”
However, in the US over half the homes with broadband have coax-based DOCSIS. He said where there is a need for broadband speeds in excess of 10 Mbps, then coax or fiber are needed. (That’s because telcos have not yet begun deploying VDSL2 Vectoring with potential speeds of up to 100 Mbps.) Even so, coax still has lots of upside, he said, because DOCSIS currently uses less than 200 Mhz of coax’s 1 Ghz capacity.
According to Liu, EoC in general is a technology that is better suited to the network topology that exists in China — fiber to the multiple dwelling unit (MDU) and coax that runs from the fiber’s termination point in or immediately outside the MDU to each residence.
Liu said that QCA’s BAN technology is a low-cost and highly effective alternative to the DOCSIS technology that US and European cablecos use for broadband, he said.
China
Developing New C-Home Plug AV Standard
China is developing a new open standard called C-Home Plug AV (CHPAV) that is expected to be completed in a few months. QCA’s HomePlug AV-based EoC will, of course, comply. However, because it’s open, other companies could and no doubt will develop products that meet CHPAV requirements. Of course, QCA believes it’s in a strong position in the CHPAV market.
Liu said that as planned, the fragmented Chinese cablecos are slowly consolidating and that their deployment of two-way networks is proceeding apace.
Liu expects that in 2013 competitors such as Broadcom will launch a major counter offensive, but that QCA will be able to fight off the effort because the rival CDOCSIS-based EoC overshoots the majority of the market need. Even if Broadcom strips out “bells and whistles,” he said, it will still be priced higher than QCA’s offering. It’ll have the same kinds of problems that Intel has making low-cost, low-power chips to compete against ARM. C-DOCSIS has as much or more capability than the EoC version of HomePlug, he said, but it is also priced accordingly.
Looking
Beyond China
QCA is already looking beyond China and has trials for STBs with.....
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