ITU Issues Home Networking Standard

The ITU has issued the first G.hn the first standard for in-home networks capable of delivering room-to-room HDTV. The standard operates over power, coaxial, phone and other home network wiring. The ITU says that it will give up to 20 times the throughput of existing wireless technologies and three times that of existing wired technologies. G.hn-compliant products could be on the market as early as 2010.

The ITU will work with the HomeGrid Forum, which has been formed to support the G.hn standards efforts.

Recommendation ITU-T G.9960 focuses on the physical or PHY layer, giving the data bit rate and quality of service necessary for triple-play residential services as well as business-type services delivered over xDSL, PON, or other access technology. In step with ITU guidelines on new standards development, several power saving modes have been incorporated. Ongoing work is focused on the media access control (MAC) layer.

Home networking is clearly a key issue for IPTV services. The ITU is entering a field that is already occupied by MoCA and HPNA. The ITU brings considerable weight as the premier global telecom standards organization.

ITU Delivers IPTV Standards

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced standards for IPTV. The standards were built with technical contributions from leading service providers and manufacturers. The new standards were developed by the Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV) in ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).

These standards are intended to give service providers — broadcasters, ISPs, cable operators or telecom service providers — control over their platforms and their offerings. Standards will encourage innovation, help mask the complexity of services, guarantee quality of service, ensure interoperability and help players remain competitive.

Contained within the documents produced by the Focus Group are the high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services. ITU’s next phase of IPTV work — IPTV-GSI (global standards initiative) — will centre on the preparation of standards based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols required.

Twenty-one documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS), security, digital rights management (DRM), unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks will be submitted to the ITU-T Study Group charged with progressing and distributing the work. The IPTV-GSI will build on the momentum generated over the past 20 months, and it is foreseen that contributions and participation will continue to increase.

The first meeting of IPTV-GSI will convene in Seoul, Republic of Korea from 15 to 22 January 2008.

IPTV standards are surely needed, but they will probably be too late to strongly influence the major IPTV deployments already underway in Europe, Asia, and North America. These IPTV services have made their implementation decisions and are not likely to change them in major ways to accommodate new standards.