I recently had a chance to visit with Tom Starr, Lead Member of Technical Staff for AT&T. Tom is a recent AT&T award winner.
It stands to reason that the world’s largest telecommunications company would have an interested in G.hn. After all, the company has over 1,000,000 American homes on its HomePNA based wired network that runs its U-verse triple play offering.
After installing this many homes you learn a lot about wiring and the realities that not all homes are wired equally. In a perfect world, you’d have what Tom kept referring to “no new wires,” but the reality is that each home has different wiring types in each room that lend themselves better at connectivity and delivering services.
From day one, Tom has been active and working with the ITU’s development of the G.hn standard (which is now officially called G.9960). He told me that AT&T is watching the development of the G.hn standard for a few reasons:
- Connect to any room no matter what the wiring type may be. Get to a point where the customer can self-install new hardware- something considered to be the holy grail of any video provider
- Have built-in diagnostics and tools that allow for remote manageability and ease of use.
- Have multiple supply sources. And when you have an industry standard like G.hn, you get to a certain point of critical mass where you will have many technology, equipment, parts and product marketers all supplying the channel with compatible and industry standard offerings. This helps grow the industry ecosystem and supply chain.
I’ve been an AT&T U-verse customer for over three years. Some of my readers may also know my 3Screens blog, in which I write a consumer facing blog about AT&T’s three screen strategy.
Everywire is a blog that will talk about G.hn and related wired networking news.
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