HomePlug Powerline Alliance release AV2 specification

The Hompeplug Powerline Alliance have released the Homeplug AV2 specification allowing for HD video streams to be delivered across standard in home/premise mains wiring. The AV2 specification is backwards compatible with the existing Homeplug AV standard (also known as IEEE 1901).

The new standard was developed by the HomePlug AV Technical Working Group which is made up of representatives of Broadcom, devolo, France Telecom, Marvell, Qualcomm Atheros, Ralink, Sony, SPiDCOM Technologies and STMicroelectronics

The AV2 standard supports a Gigabit/s physical link and can support multiple input/output links between units.

The current AV500 standard supports 500Mb/s links and units are now generally available. Many manufacturers have moved to smaller chip fabrication processes (i.e. 45nm or smaller) and so the Powerline chip are smaller in size allowing smaller end-user products and also for the chips to be embedded in more devices such as consumer audio/video products.