Networking 101: HomePNA For a residential network, there are plenty of ways to send data over a wire. The most common way is to send it over an Ethernet cable, which is why its iterations of 10/100/1000 and CAT 5e/CAT 6 have become so pervasive in modern homes. However, there are other standards that can accomplish the same goal of connectivity, using other wires commonly found in the home. These include Powerline adapters that use the home’s electrical wiring, and MoCA that uses coaxial cable.

That does leave us with one other wire in the house, the copper phone lines from POTS, that can be used for a data connection. In at least some homes, the old phone jacks would be in convenient places for data connections, as it was common to have a phone by a desk in a home office when landlines were in vogue. While it never really took off, there are standards that can use the copper phone lines for data connections. Let’s explore this standard that is still trying to live up to its potential, and what held it back. The Home PNA is just such a group of standards, with PNA standing for Phoneline Networking Alliance; it also gets referred to as HPNA. It was a networking standard that allows data to be sent over the PSTN (public switched telephone network), while coexisting with more conventional phone signals, including voice communication and faxing. Home PNA in its initial 1.0 version goes back to the Fall of 1998, and had speeds of 1 Mbps. A little over a year later, the 2.1 version had faster 32 Mbps speeds, and was fully backward with the previous standard. The current Home PNA standard is 3.1, with speeds of up to 320 Mbps, over both phone and coax cables, with integrated in QoS and remote diagnostics. It also has multi-spectrum operation, which allows for coexistence of the Home PNA signal with other signals, including a video signal on coax. The Home PNA standard is quite robust, supporting up to 63 simultaneous devices on a network, with clients up to 1,000 feet apart (recall that Ethernet has a max distance of 100 meters/328 feet). Back in 2007, Verizon chose coax and the MoCA standard for its residential data transfers with its inherent advantages of a shielded cable, and that it is unregulated. Around the same time, AT&T decided to go with the copper phone lines for their U-verse ISP offering, citing pluses of taking advantage of existing twisted-pair copper wiring, and the ability to pinpoint networking issues. Unfortunately, this put AT&T as the only major provider that was using the PNA standard, with Verizon and all the cable providers using coax and MoCA. AT&T also stalled in their deployment and expansion of their service, which did not help the popularity of Home PNA, with speeds that were less competitive than their cable brethren in many markets. With Home PNA stalled, attention was turned to the Home Grid. This was formed in 2008 as an industry alliance. Their plan was to promote G.hn, which is gigabit home networking technology. This Home Grid Forum was designed to transmit data across all the wires in the home, including coax, fiber, powerline and twister copper phone lines. The Home Grid Forum’s promise is that “It just works” and to provide a robust wired backbone, with the ability to transmit 4K video with ease. While this all sounds fine and well, at the end of the day, this latest iteration of the Home PNA, the Home Grid Forum has to compete against more established technologies to transmit data, including Ethernet, coax and Wi-Fi. Twisted copper is either about to experience a renaissance, or is slowing dwindling away depending on which analysis is looked at. Feel free to discuss issues with Home PNA networking, twisted copper wiring, or the Home Grid Forum’s ambitious plans below. This article was contributed by the DSLReports.com community. If you'd like to receive payment for writing content like this for our front page, please drop us a line.







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Most recommended from 23 comments



bandit8623

join:2004-09-08

Minneapolis, MN 4 recommendations bandit8623 Member Hpna Centurylink also uses hpna when needed.

tschmidt

MVM

join:2000-11-12

Milford, NH ·Hollis Hosting

·FirstLight Fiber

·Republic Wireless

4 recommendations tschmidt MVM VDSL for point to point I helped a friend extend their home LAN about 300 feet out to their barn last year. Only had a single spare pair. Initially though about using HomePNA but was unable to find any gear.



Ended up getting a pair of VDSL Ethernet range extenders. Works great if you only need a point-top-point connection.



/tom

cpayne5

Premium Member

join:2004-01-06 3 recommendations cpayne5 Premium Member Happy HPNA User I have been using three TrendNet TPA311s for the past two years to extend my home network out to other buildings on my property over RG6. The closest is only 150' away. The farthest is 2000' away.



Works great. 100mbps, 2000' away, for under $200 (including the cost of the direct burial RG6). Much better than the wireless solution it replaced.

Darknessfall

Premium Member

join:2012-08-17 Cisco DPC3008

Asus RT-N66

3 edits 3 recommendations Darknessfall Premium Member AT&T U-verse HPNA A lot of U-verse's HPNA usage was primarily over coax from what I understand. I'm not really sure how often I saw it used over existing phone wiring, but I guess there were some cases where it happened. I never really had a iNID setup so I might be wrong, but I think those used HPNA over TP for the connection back to the outside unit. I believe most U-verse HPNA setups took the coax route. Back in the old days of U-verse, it was really convenient to use coax because of the need of just one cable for STBs and the DSL signal(back when the old gateways supported DSL over coax). That's how my setup was for many years. It wasn't until recently that I ditched all of the coax on our setup. HPNA was a little funny at times on my wiring, with my STBs.



Frontier also has some HPNA over coax usage for some of their legacy FiOS markets. They had used an ONT with HPNA coax out, as well as a HPNA coax -> Ethernet bridge to the FiOS router.



Though, it seems AT&T's latest equipment and Frontier's Vantage gateways(I'm in an ex. U-verse market) are ditching the coax/HPNA. I don't know what the future of HPNA will be.