It may be a year or two out before you start seeing this in your home, but last week, standards body organization, ITU, passed a consent agreement to move forward on the new home networking standard known at G.hn.
Your present home network that AT&T delivers and moves your video content around the house is based on HomePNA.
Even by Texas Standards, This is Big. (And Fast)
The new standard is going to mean that AT&T is going to be able to deliver 20x the throughput of current wireless technologies and 3xtimes the performance of home-wired networks. Plus, all the chip makers and vendors that make products for your home network like your DVR will now be able to base product development on one single standard, giving us, the millions of consumers who are AT&T customers more choice and options of products we can connect with in the future.
Learn More About It Over at Everywire
I'm going to be heading up a new blog called Everywire, in which I'll be covering the evolution and development of this standard.
It's just in its initial build-out phase, so if you're a 3Screens reader you can get a sneak preview now.
Last month’s deployment of AT&T’s U-verse Voice in my home represented a fundamental shift in the way I look at my residential telephony service. And now, with today’s introduction of its HomeManager™ product offering, the phone company as we no longer know it, is extending the value chain in helping me integrate and manage all of my IP services in the home.
Overview The AT&T HomeManager consists of three devices: the HomeManager Frame, HomeManager Handset, and HomeManager Base.
The HomeManager Frame is a cordless touch screen device with a vivid 7 inch color display that provides easy access to your address book, as well as your call logs, voice mail, Yellow Pages and White pages, weather, news, email calendar digital photos and videos – and it’s a speaker phone. It has the look and feel of a scaled down tablet PC and could be a hint of form factors to come, especially in light of Intel’s recent announcement of its Urban Max prototype displayed last month.
The HomeManager Handset is what it is- a handset but with the feel of something more like a Cisco, Nortel or Avaya office IP phone you see in the enterprise.
The HomeManager Base which hooks into the Residential Gate way serves as a means to connect to the Frame and Handset.
First Impressions: It looks really cool. Especially the HomeManager Frame.
It was easy to install.
I was up and going in about 10 minutes. The directions are easy to read and follow.
The HomeManager Frame got me thinking about how I consume and apply information. In the case of Yellow Pages, the HomeManager Frame is a great application – and a better application than having Yellow Pages on U-verse TV. Frankly, Yellow Pages on U-verse TV is slow and cumbersome. But on the HomeManager Frame it’s fast and easy to use. Oh- by the way, I still use the paper version of the Yellow Pages which sits on a shelf in the kitchen.
While you can get your email on the HomeManager Frame, it’s sort of clunky and not as elegant as checking or composing email or texts on my iPhone. The HomeManager Frame also comes with a pen stylus for tapping text instead of using your fingers.
The address book is a good idea, but you are out of luck in trying to sync it if you have an iPhone. If you are a subscriber to the AT&T Mobile Backup Service, you can set your address book to automatically sync with your AT&T mobile phone address book on select phones. (If you have an iPhone, I highly recommend the MobileMe service which syncs your PC/iPhone/and your .Me account in the cloud).
One thing that the HomeManager Frame does display – and can be your screen saver, is the weather. This is a case where this type of device lends itself best for a certain type of information that I want to have at my disposal.
The lesson here is that there is no one device or communications platform that can be all things to all consumers. The other lesson is that slowly but surely, AT&T is helping me build out a small-scale enterprise network in my home with service options that can be deployed on a variety of hardware platforms. At the end of the day, it can be my TV, my PC, my wireless device, or now my Frame.
Pricing: The basic HomeManager offering is on sale starting today for $299. Additional handsets are available for $69 each. I wonder why AT&T doesn’t offer a $100 rebate if you sign up for U-verse, or at the very least, let you put 10 non-interest payments of $29 per month on your phone bill.
Availability:
You may purchase your HomeManager today in the following major AT&T markets: Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. I assume others will follow as they roll the product out.
I am getting lots of calls and emails about yesterday's announcement from AT&T in regards to Total Home DVR.
Here are some answers: 1. What do I have to do to upgrade to AT&T's Total Home DVR?
Nothing. No equipment. No software. No magic. When AT&T is ready to deploy to your market, you will be notified and your upgrade will happen via your phone line.
2. How much will the upgrade cost?Are there additional fees for the upgrade after this happens?
Nothing. Nada. No salesman will call.
3. When will Whole Home DVR come to my market?
I don't know. I wish I did. But I know that AT&T is hoping to get this deployed in all markets by year-end.
4. What is all this stuff I hear about HomePNA? Do I have this?
HomePNA is an industry standard that enables your home network. AT&T has adopted it. Nothing for you to do. They basically make sure that the vendors who provide products like your set top box or your residential gateway can do triple-play home networking solutions for distributing entertainment data over both existing coax cable and phone lines.
5. How many TV's will this work on?
Currently up to 8 TVs (why do you have 8 TVs anyway?)
6. How much storage will my DVR handle?
37 hours of HD content and 133 hours of SD content.
7. How many HD shows can I watch at the same time?
You can watch up to five HD programs simultaneously throughout the home, including two live HD programs and three recorded HD programs. Personally, if your family is watching that much TV, trying turning off the TV and spend some family time together.
Also, get your kids to read more. Without the TV, the PC or their cell phones.
8. How many shows can I record at once?
You can record up to four programs at once on a single DVR.
Also, repeat- TV is great. Reading and quiet time is also good.
Lately, I've been digging and catching up on the subject of Ultra High Definition - or UltraHD.
Don't get me wrong. I love my Sony big screen HD, but now that it's approaching three years in use, I am starting to think about maybe replacing it, putting in another room, and shifting to UltraHD, once these sets do come available to consumers.
But there's more to UltraHD than just a pretty picture....
While the potential to have an ever better and crisper resolution in my home is compelling, I think there is another issue that service providers need to consider.
By the time UltraHD gets here, AT&T will have already deployed its Whole Home DVR in my home. And with the increasing trend towards home networks and the need for increased bandwidth, my take is that G.hn - is going to be the "next generation" home network technology standard for the Weinkrantz family (and millions of others around the world.)
Coax, Phone Wire or Powerline. G.hn good to go.
My house in San Antonio, Texas, USA, may not be like your house in Lisbon, Portugal, where you might use Powerline. In G.hn, ITU-T members are creating a single standard for home networking over existing wires – coax, phone wires and powerline – with the speed and features needed by tomorrow’s high-performance applications.
G.hn likes all flavors of existing-wire home networking. And WiFi is pretty universal. Good news: at my house and yours, we'll get the best of both worlds.
There is some chatter in the blogosphere and on individual sites like here, here and here where I have commented on this issue.
Is UltraHD on your radar? Drop me a line-- alan at weinkrantz dot com
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