HomePNA Achieves 320Mbps With Copper

illeism writes "Ars Techinca is reporting that the HPNA has made a significant stride in copper speed. From the article: 'The HomePNA Alliance, backers of a networking spec that works over coaxial or twisted pair wiring, has announced the release of the HPNA 3.1 specification. The big news comes in the form of a speed jump from 128Mbps to 320Mbps, which pushes it above competing networking standards HomePlug AV and MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) for the title of fastest networking tech outside of gigabit Ethernet and makes it a more attractive option for triple-play providers.'"

Re:What?

[cptgrudge]

What was wrong with gigabit ethernet?

Each run being limited to a length of 100 meters?

All about the coax

[Kadin2048]

There's plenty of colleges that only have their internal phone lines the the rooms and are delivering internet connections via DSL technology from their closets. Schools with 2000 students on campus and sometimes in buildings on the historic registry. They REALLY want to be able to use that existing infrastructure to deliver a high speed connection.

Bingo. I remember that my college had coax strung all over the place, mostly installed in the 70s and 80s, when CATV was still considered cool. (Actually, they had enough hardware to play at being their own cable TV company; in addition to giving you broadcast stations, there were even some "campus TV" stations with original programming, a scrolling bulletin-board, and campus radio-over-TV channel. They even had upstream-broadcasting amplifiers, so you could plug into any outlet with a special converter and broadcast live to the entire campus. *sigh* That was cool.) Since it was being installed at a time when much new construction was going on, there are a lot of places where coax goes and more recent computer network cables don't. Pulling new cable is an expensive proposition, and I think there could be a sizable niche market for any technology that allowed reasonably fast computer networking over existing cable TV coax.

Re:A boon for twisted pair or coax

[Fnkmaster]

Networking that is not Ethernet generally fails.

I disagree with this. Try HPNA 2.0, it does absolutely work, even with less than ideal wiring. It's far superior to powerline networking in that sense, which claims completely unrealistic bandwidth numbers.

You may be right that in a really old home with really crappy wiring, it wouldn't work as well, but I've used HPNA in a couple of apartments with absolutely no problems.

Of course, this is all 10Mbps HPNA 2.0, because no mainstream manufacturers have ever seen fit to support HPNA 3.0, so I don't know how well a higher bandwidth version of phoneline networking would hold up, and whether they'd be able to meet the numbers they are claiming in normal, non-laboratory environments.

Your suggestion that wiring up a home is "easy" is a strange one. I have no idea how to do this properly, and I've been the CTO of several software companies. You think even most tech saavy people can do this? You need to punch lots and lots of holes in the wall to thread those wires from one end of a home to another, then patch all those walls and repaint them to mint condition. This is not just a 1-2 hour deal unless you are going from one end of the room to another, in which case you'd not bother wiring it up anyway. Try to get a quote from a company to do this all properly, and it will cost you a couple grand.

I agree.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had 3 computers in my home using HPNA. One of the cards died recently and I just could not find any place selling them. So I had to lay down some RJ45 across the hallway just to remain connected. I tried wireless before I went with HPNA; it just wasn't good enough. My home is rather large, and no matter what the signal was going to have to go through at least 3 walls and a large room full of electronics to cover everyone. The signal did not make it through. Even going through just one wall to the next room, the signal dropped to about 85%. HPNA is the most practical answer for most home networking: all of your rooms are already wired for telephones! The best solution is obviously to just wire everything up with RJ45, but that is just not practical. HPNA makes the best use of existing technology.

Re:Erm....?

[Rojo^]

Actually, the other pair is for shielding and redundancy. If primary pair shorts, the Telecommunications techs can just switch the room to the other pair without having to run new drops. With thousands of tenants in student housing, as often as trouble tickets come in, not having to drop a new line into each room where there's a problem is a huge saver in productivity and response time.