No New Wires IC Shipments Set to Top 100 Million Units in 2013

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
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WELLINGBOROUGH, UK — ‘No new wires’ technologies, which utilise coaxial, phoneline or powerline connections in the home, are rapidly gaining favour with service providers and consumers alike. IMS Research’s Home Networks and Residential Gateways 2012 report predicts that over 100 million ICs supporting these technologies will be shipped in 2013 – but what is driving this growth, and which technologies will benefit most from it?

The market for no new wires is hotting up as more service providers deploy products which offer one of several no new wires technologies, and as consumers become increasingly aware of retail products, which can be used to quickly and easily expand their home networks. Operators, such as AT&T and Verizon, have already deployed no new wires technologies widely in the US, in the form of HomePNA and MoCA (both using coax), respectively.

000s of units shipped

The growth of IPTV is a major driver for no new wires, as operators seek to ensure a quality of service between residential gateways and set-top boxes which meets customers’ expectations. Coaxial solutions have therefore won early favour with a number of providers, but powerline options such as HomePlug, UPA and HD-PLC are also proving popular. Powerline is particularly widespread in EMEA and Asia where the coaxial infrastructure is not as well developed as in the Americas.

Heath Lockett, market analyst at IMS Research commented “With coaxial sockets being much more prevalent in North America than in EMEA and Asia, it’s not surprising that, to date, MoCA and HomePNA have seen most of their success there. However, as the no new wires market develops over the next few years, we’re going to see coaxial technologies make their way into Europe, and powerline options like HomePlug really start to become increasingly popular in the Americas.”

MoCA may well be forecast to be largely confined to the Americas over the next few years, but such is the appetite for IPTV, the proven reliability of MoCA, and the average number of MoCA devices per household, that other technologies are likely to play second fiddle to it in terms of IC shipments. However, from a purely installed network-based perspective, the larger retail presence of HomePlug will see it remain the most popular no new wires technology until at least 2016.

Lockett continued “The no new wires market is really starting to gather momentum and the next couple of years hold great potential for the technologies which are staking their claim to it; and that’s before we even consider the competition between the IEEE’s 1901 and ITU’s G.hn standards, but that’s a story for another day.”

Detailed analysis of the broadband, CPE and no new wires markets are available in IMS Research’s newly published Home Networks and Residential Gateways 2012 report.