Lost in the media swirl around Sigma Designs’ acquisition of home networking chipmaker (and Rainier client) Coppergate is the exciting news that last week the ITU-T approved the key Physical Layer and architecture components of the G.hn home networking specification. The holy grail of home networking, a unified standard that drives broadband content over “everywire,” is now one step closer to becoming a commercial reality.

With the ITU-T approval, the G.hn standard is now deemed stable enough to allow silicon manufacturers like Coppergate to move forward with their development programs and bring products to market.

The approval marks another step in the steady adoption of G.hn and reaffirms a longstanding desire to unite a fragmented industry which currently uses a variety of incompatible technologies that typically address only single types of household wiring options – coax, phone line, or power line.

Having played in the home networking silicon market since the 1990s when we launched Enikia, and having worked with HomePLUG, as well, we’ve had a front row seat to a decade of wrangling over home networking standards. I’m as excited as the next guy (well, as the next guy who cares about such things) to see G.hn coming closer to fruition.

Imagine when connectivity and content routing inside our homes becomes as easy as electricity is today.

Medical device “Plug-and-Play” interoperability is a crucial issue today with the eventual goal being an integrated clinical environment, in which all devices are interconnected, in plug-and-play fashion, for better management. Most  medical devices used in hospitals don’t “talk” to each other in event the simpest of ways that our PCs “talk” to our printers!

Peter Szolovits, a professor of computer science at MIT who studies medical data integration says “where you have a bunch of data simultaneously, you can do a better job of trying to understand what’s going on with the patient.”

The issue is important enough for Mass General Hospital in Boston to have established the MD PnP program dedicated to “leading the adoption of open standards and technology to interconnect medical devices for improving patient safetyand healthcare efficiency.”

MD PnP is part of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and now the group has proposed a new set of standards for an”Integrated Clinical Environment.” Julian Goldman, director of MD PnP, calls the standards “a comprehensive [design] platform… that allows the global community to innovate and build cool things on top of it that improve patient safety.”