Introduction

My last look at powerline networking products was in the HomePlug Turbo Adapter Round Up, where I found that the "85 Mbps" advertised speed turned out to be typically 10 Mbps of real, usable bandwidth. Although this is twice the 5 Mbps delivered by non-turbo HomePlug 1.0 products, it's still borderline for IPTV service providers, which is the target customer. The real HomePlug solution for video streaming lies in HomePlug AV, which, unfortunately seems to remain six to nine months away - as it has for the past year or so.

This delay has opened a market window that Madrid-based DS2 (Design of Systems on Silicon) has attacked with a vengeance using its high speed "200 Mbps" powerline technology. DS2's success to date has been mostly in markets outside the U.S., since that's mainly where the action is in IPTV right now. The company claims an installed base of around 600,000 units with 30,000 in Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica alone. DS2's success seems likely to continue, given that Netgear recently announced that it will be shipping products aimed at the IPTV market, based on DS2's technology.

But we don't need to wait to see what "200 Mbps" powerline networking technology is like, because Vancouver-based Corinex is shipping its AV200 Powerline products today. This review will take an in-depth look at Corinex' powerline product and a shorter one at a version of the product for use with coax-based TV distribution systems.

Tags: AV200, CableLAN, Corinex, DS2, HomePlug, powerline,

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