On 18 October 2016 the HomePlug Alliance announced that all of its specifications would be put into the public domain and that other organizations would be taking on future activities relating to deployment of the existing technologies.

[2] On 18 October 2016, the HomePlug Alliance announced that all of its specifications would be put into the public domain and that other organizations would be taking on future activities relating to deployment of the existing technologies.

HomePlug solved this problem by increasing the communication carrier frequencies so that the signal is conveyed by the neutral conductor which is common to all phases.

Founded in 2000, the HomePlug Powerline Alliance's goal was to create a standard to use existing home electrical wiring to communicate between products and connect to the Internet.

The HomePlug AV (for audio-video) specification released in 2005 increased physical layer (PHY) peak data rates from approximately 13.0 Mbit/s[3] to 200 Mbit/s.

[2] In 2011, the HomePlug Green PHY specification was adopted by Ford, General Motors, Audi, BMW, Daimler, Porsche, and Volkswagen, as a connectivity standard for Plug-In Electrical Vehicle.

[7] As of 2017, there are at least six chip vendors shipping HomePlug AV chipsets with IEEE 1901 specification support: Broadcom, Qualcomm Atheros, Sigma Designs, Intellon, SPiDCOM, and MStar.

[8] Newer versions of HomePlug support the use of Ethernet in bus topology via OFDM modulation, which enables several distinct data carriers to coexist in the same wire.

Also, HomePlug's OFDM technology can turn off (mask) any sub-carriers that overlap previously allocated radio spectrum in a given geographic region, thus preventing interference.

As of late 2012, the most widely deployed HomePlug devices are "adapters", which are standalone modules that plug into wall outlets (or power strips [but not surge protectors] or extension cords) and provide one or more Ethernet ports.

In a simple home network, the Internet gateway router connects via Ethernet cable to a powerline adapter, which in turn plugs into a nearby power outlet.

Several are announced for early 2013 that also include 802.11ac connectivity, the combination of which with HomePlug is sold by Qualcomm Atheros as its Hy-Fi hybrid networking technology, an implementation of IEEE P1905.

This permits a device to use wired Ethernet, powerline or wireless communication as available to provide a redundant and reliable failover – thought to be particularly important in consumer applications where there is no onsite expertise typically available to debug connections.

[citation needed] The HomePlug 1.0 MAC Layer uses channel access based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) to transport data from 46 to 1500 bytes long from encapsulated IEEE 802.3 frames as MAC Service Data Units (MSDUs) (so doesn't support jumbo frames).

[citation needed] The HomePlug AV specification, which was introduced in August 2005, provides sufficient bandwidth for applications such as HDTV and VoIP.

[11] Utilizing adaptive modulation on up to 1155 OFDM sub-carriers, turbo convolution codes for error correction, two-level MAC framing with ARQ,[12] and other techniques, HomePlug AV can achieve near the theoretical maximum bandwidth across a given transmission path.

[13][14] Some Qualcomm Atheros-based adapters comply with the HomePlug AV specification but employ a proprietary extension that increases the PHY-rate to 500 Mbit/s primarily by using a wider spectrum.

High capacity broadband is not needed for such applications; the most important requirements are low power and cost, reliable communication, and compact size.

Although it is technically possible to achieve such backward compatibility, doing so is not economically feasible because of the high cost of circuitry that would have to support different forward error correction (FEC) techniques and feature sets.

In the UK there have been suggestions that users of powerline equipment should be prosecuted under the Wireless Telegraphy Act, if they cause interference to official radio systems.