Home Phoneline Networking Alliance - A
standard introduced for
networking via the
pre-existing POTS phonelines that
run through a
house, using the
802.3 Ethernet standard. HPNA 1.0 supported
connection speeds of 1
Mbps, and the
recent 2.0 standard is
backwards compatible with HPNA 1.0
devices and currently supports speeds up to 10Mbps, though it should
support 100Mbps in the
future.
HPNA devices operate at frequencies up to 30MHz, which is higher than the frequency used by voice traffic (between 20Hz and 3.4KHz) and DSL (25KHz to 582KHz), meaning that you can talk on the phone, use your internet connection, and access your home network at the same time.
Many companies currently offer HPNA solutions, usually in both USB and internal PCI cards. 3com has their HomeConnect family of hardware, Diamond has the HomeFree line of HPNA adapters, Intel includes their phoneline adapters in their AnyPoint family, LinkSys adapters are included in their HomeLink line, and NetGear has their PhoneLine adapters as well.