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Talking To Your Fridge? You Need In-House Broadband Over Powerline: Page 5 of 10

HomePlug AV is built from the ground up to support entertainment applications such as HDTV (High Definition TV) and Home Theater. HomePlug AV will run in the range of 2-28 MHz, offering a raw signaling speed of up to 200 Mbps through the use of OFDM. Once TCP/IP and other overhead considerations are taken into account, the actual throughput will be in the range of 100 Mbps.

HomePlug AV will offer inherent GoS consideration through the use of IEEE 802.1Q VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) tags for marking high-priority traffic such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and the streaming audio and video components of HDTV. HomePlug AV improves on 1.0 security through the use of 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which is virtually unbreakable.

Plug & Play?

Tests in some 500 homes showed that 80% of outlet pairs can connect at 5 Mbps or better, and 98% at 1 Mbps or better. That all depends on the condition of the inside wire, of course. I live in a beautiful old (1909) four-square farmhouse with some remaining knob-and-tube wiring that somehow evaded the restoration and upgrade process some years ago; so I'm a bit leery. But, heck, I have some problems with my 802.11b/g network as well.

Some systems are targeted toward commercial office building and hotels and motels that can't easily be rewired with Cat 5/6 for DSL or PON, and that aren't suitable for WLANs. Since some such buildings have their own transformers, issues of sharing bandwidth with neighbors are avoided.