Comcast, Broadcom, Ucentric team for
new home networking trial

By Duffy Hayes
From The September 9, 2002 Edition Of CED Broadband Direct

Whole-house media distribution is at the heart of a just announced trial of home networking technology between operator Comcast and technology providers Broadcom and Ucentric Systems. The three announced plans for a joint trial in Philadelphia that should put some powerful advanced home networking gear and services in the hands of some select Comcast customers.

Though not a true expansion of an earlier, ongoing laboratory trial between Comcast and Ucentric, the new project will take the form of a limited residential rollout with friendly Comcast customers, providing for more specific data collection from users in the field, especially with regard to the baseline transmission technology Ucentric aims to employ in their multi-TV PVR system now under development.

"We're taking the HPNA over coax (transmission technology) into the field to a limited number of homes to do some initial testing. So we're really testing the underlying networking technology ... making sure there aren't any radiation issues, that the shielding strategies work, and that we don't have any transmission back up the cable that we don't want," explains the recently-appointed Ucentric CEO Michael Collette. "It's really looking at how HPNA over coax works in a live environment as opposed to a lab environment."

Having a reliable, robust transmission medium is an essential component of the home networking and multiple-TV PVR system Ucentric is looking to deliver to operators. Ucentric's approach to home networking and media distribution goes beyond the single-box solutions that make up the market for PVR and home media distribution today. Its software powers a central "home server" and distributes content and information to other televisions in the house by employing multiple thin client "slave" units fanning out from the central server.

And CEO Collette thinks the company has found that transmission platform in Broadcom's HomePNA iLine32 chipset, the technology providing physical and QoS protocol layers in the Ucentric system, at least in these initial field trials. Because their multi-TV PVR system ships high-bandwidth video and information to sites throughout the home, typical home networking technologies like 802.11, HomePlug, and the basic HomePNA (phoneline) platforms might not have the horsepower to do what Ucentric would be asking it to do.

"We're probably the most demanding home networking application out there today, and I think that we're really driving demand for more and more advanced networking technologies," Collette added.