Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 8 Jan 2001 17:35:10 -0600 (CST) | From | Joseph Wang <> | Subject | HomePNA 2.0 flamage |
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I've been trying to search for a 10 Mpbs phone ethernet card that works with linux. Apparently all of the products that implement HomePNA 2.0 use the Broadcom chipset and Broadcom has been extremely non-responsive at providing chipset specifications.
The situation really irks me because the whole point of having a standard is to allow for competition between different manufacturers. In the case of HomePNA 1.0, there were some chipsets that provided enough information to write a driver and it was possible to use market pressure to force chipset makers to make their products usable with linux. There were about four or five chip manufacturers with homePNA 1.0 chips and some of them provided some excellent documentation and tech specs.
This doesn't seem to be the case with HomePNA 2.0 which makes me suspect that Broadcom has a patent on some critical piece of technology. I can't think of any other reason how they seem to have a defacto monopoly on HomePNA 2.0 products. This is bad because HomePNA 1.0 products are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
My question is
1) do I have any options other than to give up on HomePNA 2.0 and start digging holes in walls. At this point, I would welecome any product that doesn't use a broadcom chip set.
2) how did Broadcom manage to get a de-facto monopoly on high speed phone line ethernet cards? If it's possible for Broadcom to do this with phone line ethernet, I shudder to think about the possibility of some other linux-unfriendly company owning a piece of critical technology.
3) is there anything that we as a community can do other than to keep shouting at broadcom?A
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joseph Wang Ph.D. Globewide Network Academy president@gnacademy.org FREE Distance Education catalog database http://www.gnacademy.org Over 20,000 courses and degrees
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