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.

When Bell Aliant needed a differentiator to compete with cable, it decided to provide home networking – a rarity back in 2005 in the cable space. But while the telephone service provider was comfortable delivering signals to the side of the house, and even into the house, it was clueless about routing signals inside the residence.

Then BA’s parent company, Bell Canada, started playing around with HomePNA (HPNA) – the home networking technology that runs IP packets over existing residential coax. Viola – now instead of fighting cable, BA was using installed coax (put there by the cable operator) to make money. The company estimates that between 90 and 95 percent of “new” Bell Aliant installs are in homes that already have coax running throughout the house.

In his CED Magazine article, telecom writer Jim Barthold discusses HomePNA impact on Bell Atlantic’s business, and talks with Michael Weissman of CopperGate – the leading provider of HomePNA technology.

Bell Aliant has now launched IPTV in three of its six provinces using a combination of Corinex Ethernet networking gear and Motorola set-top boxes equipped with CopperGate HPNA chips to deliver IPTV and later IP video to multiple TVs within a residence.