ARRIS Group's New Video Gateway Now Uses Entropic MoCA 2.0

Entropic (News - Alert) is a major name when it comes to semiconductor solutions in the growing connected home market, and as such, that's bringing a lot of opportunity along with it. Entropic has thus announced just yesterday that it will be working with ARRIS Group in bringing its Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) 2.0 solution to ARRIS' MG2402 video gateway. What that's going to do is make home entertainment just a little more robust for those who favor the cable feed.

ARRIS' video gateway uses a lot of software in common with Comcast (News - Alert), including both XG5 and Reference Design Kit (RDK) specifications of which Comcast was the primary designer. This puts it in a comparatively good position as far as the cable market goes, which is still substantial though losing at least some ground to cable cutting technologies. Given that the cable industry as a whole is looking to make a move from the traditional set-top box and accompanying digital recorder to more of a gateway / IP-client network affair, which makes video gateway services like ARRIS' in demand. Entropic, in turn, saw that particular bit of writing on the wall and specifically set up its MoCA 2.0 solution to accommodate this change, ensuring that it was the most reliable it could establish, and with the best MAC throughput it could set up.

Entropic's MoCA 2.0 solution is backward compatible with MoCA 1.0 and MoCA 1.1 devices as well, giving it not only maximum versatility, but also maximum capability when it comes to streaming video around the house. Word from Entropic's vice president of marketing for its Connectivity Group, Al Servati, says that this "...is the first official product announcement of MoCA 2.0 designed into a headless gateway."

Services like Entropic's allow cable providers to bridge the gap between old and new style systems, allowing older coaxial systems to be able to work with the kind of high-bandwidth technology that is required for today's improved home entertainment networks, as well as connected homes in general. For those interested in seeing what Entropic has in mind for its users like ARRIS, Entropic will be exhibiting its MoCA 2.0 solution at the Alsace suite in the Wynn Las Vegas hotel.

There's no denying that home entertainment is seeing rapid changes. From full home connectivity and networking to solutions that don't even require a cable company, there are many different players in the great and growing battle for living room dominance. It's good to see the cable companies working to get ahead by bringing out new offerings and keeping itself fresh and relevant, but will these efforts be enough to get them back on top? Or will cable cutting manage to take down cable for good?

The war for the living room is shaping up to be a very hard-fought war indeed, so there will likely be many more developments to come in terms of just who's going to come out on top before it's all said and done.