Speaking at the IPTV World Triple Play Forum, Victor Dominguez, DS2's Director of Strategy and Standardization, outlined the reasons why DS2's 200Mbps powerline solution is the only regulatory complaint technology available to transmit high quality digital TV signals around the home.

Dominguez was dismissive about claimed alternatives to DS2... "Alternatives lack the main features required for operator deployment such as multi-cast which is required to interface with IPTV infrastructure, as well as programmable EMI notching demanded by regulators everywhere from the FCC to the European Commission. DS2's dynamic notching is operator aware and any present or future radio bands can be enabled and disabled remotely thus complying with today's or future regulatory requirements automatically avoiding any radio signals in any part of the world". Mr Dominguez placed special emphasis on the radio friendliness of the system.



Operators selecting technologies not specifically designed to comply with the regulatory requirements for powerline AV systems were warned that they could end up regretting their technology choice in the medium term. "What concerns me about these bolt-on solutions is that they were never designed for AV streaming", said Mr Dominguez. "Unlike the DS2 time division system, they run on a probabilistic-based quality of service system. The whole network turns into a traffic jam when you add more than a few nodes". While emphasising DS2's advanced support for neighbouring networks, Mr Dominguez added that "this is not an issue for low speed home automation, these solutions are a real problem when operators need to handle multiple overlapping networks in multi-tenant buildings or when networks from neighbours interfere with one another: Its rather like trying to build a GSM network with walkie-talkies, you can show a great demo, but the whole thing falls apart in mass deployment."

On the standards front, Mr Dominguez pointed out that the Universal Powerline Association's (UPA) Digital Home Standard (DHS) for powerline AV networking will be available this summer ensuring the possibility of multi-source regulatory compliant silicon, and he added that "you won't have to wait another 2 years for reference hardware to check your design against".