HomePlug AV finally starts to appear in gear: The 2.0 spec of the powerline networking standard was in place more than a year ago, but products started to appear only relatively recently. Zyxel offered up its products last October, but it's taken a while to see major brands follow suit: Linksys finally announced their product today, the Register reports. There are competing, proprietary standards made by firms like DS2, that can't interoperate with HomePlug AV. The standard's trade-group backer, the HomePlug Alliance, however, might finally gain some traction with multiple firms in the marketplace with devices. We'll see: The Alliance's products page only mentions 1.0 and their list of products for sale don't distinguish between earlier and AV designs.
"> The Alliance�s products page only
> mentions 1.0 and their list of
> products for sale don�t distinguish
> between earlier and AV designs."
That's because the products being sold right now are not fully "HomePlug AV compliant" yet. They are based on a chip that does not implement the full spec yet, so they are labelled as "Designed for HomePlug AV", which seems to be misleading consumers.
By the way, products based on DS2 technology are not "proprietary": they are based on standard developed by UPA (Universal Powerline Association). Products from Netgear and D-Link are based on the UPA standard.