Coppergate Acquires HomePlug AV Assets of Conexant
Posted Wed, 7 May 2008 13:32:58 EDT by Michael Wolf
Today Coppergate, the primary provider of HPNA 3.1 silicon, acquired the HomePlug AV assets from Conexant. Conexant, which continues to be parted out like a 67 Chevy (it announced the sale of its set-top box products to NXP last week), hasn't been much of a presence in HomePlug, selling some HomePlug 1.0 chips and never quite productizing their HomePlug AV product line to the point where it was ready for market. CopperGate, which is one of the most active members in the next-generation triple-wire spec G.hn, sees the acquisition as a way both to serve those customers in markets where coax or phoneline won't work and as a way to have expertise in all three wiring types.
Starting out in the phoneline networking space, CopperGate saw the necessity a while ago to move to coax as that was the way most of the large North American service providers were moving, and their push in this direction helped them land the business of AT&T in the U-Verse IPTV deployments (in 2Wire gateways and Motorola and Cisco STBs) as well as in some AT&T DSL deployments. Overall, the company has seen a much greater number of ports go live on coax than copper, and in North America this isn't expected to change anytime soon. Looking forward the company is well positioned for the G.hn market, as they are really the only company today with a coax and phone line chipset and now with the acquisition of the Conexant HomePlug AV assets completing the home wiring trifecta.