IEEE P1901 Effort Still in Negotiations

By: Joyce Putscher, Principal Analyst, In-Stat
(Business News & Technology News, 13 Oct 2008)

IEEE P1901 refers to the draft standard for "Broadband over Power Line Networks: Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications." The second confirmation vote for the IEEE P1901 In-Home proposal portion took place in Spain last week in the attempt to attain the 75 percent needed for passage. The confirmation was missed by a few votes (69 percent), which was short of the 75 percent needed. Apparently, some of the voting proxies were not included in the voting outcome, because last-minute changes again occurred to the proposal, and the procedure dictates that proxies cannot be used if changes are made to the proposal after proxies are cast. It is difficult to say if their inclusion would have changed the outcome or not.

The confirmation vote on the Access proposal was conducted second, and a 48 percent affirmative vote was obtained, thereby failing to attain the needed approval to become part of the baseline of the draft standard for the Access cluster. The confirmation vote on the Coexistence proposal was conducted last; however, 80 percent of the working group abstained from the vote, because of the first two voting results so that the decision would be delayed until the next round of confirmation voting on the In-Home and Access proposals.

As we previously reported, what would happen in this case did occur—the selection process was reset and all three proposals were brought back for consideration. Members burned the midnight oil working through the elimination/merger process again, and have already arrived at the same In-Home cluster proposal. So, the current status for the In-Home cluster proposal is now back at the same step as it was last July, where it again has two chances of obtaining a 75 percent majority. Many negotiations are going on behind the scenes, so it will be interesting to see what the outcome will be when the confirmation voting takes place in San Francisco in early November.

For the Access cluster, the process was reset as well, and after elimination voting again took place already, the Mitsubishi and HomePlug-Panasonic proposals survived the elimination vote. Afterward, HomePlug, Panasonic, and Mitsubishi said that they intend to merge their proposals. A confirmation vote on the merged proposal is expected to take place at the November meeting.

The outcome of IEEE P1901 is expected to provide an important building block of the foundation of the international ITU-T G.hn any-wire standard efforts. However, the ITU-T G.hn effort covers only in-home networking, so it does not include access

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