If you’re a broadband monopolist, you probably dislike open standards because they then to make customers less captive. Of course you also enjoy the advantage of lower costs because you do not pay the lions share of the development cost. In fact if a standard is completely open, your customer may prefer to buy equipment instead of renting it from you. That;s the only problem I see with the potential for a common standard for BPL, copper, and coax. Never the less, such a standard may be on the way.

Europe’s International Telecommunication Union is hammering out a home network standard designed to run over telephone, powerline or coax networks. At least one proposal for the so-called “g.hn” effort calls for a gigabit physical layer to deliver video throughout a home.”Maybe this will help consolidate the [fragmented] home network efforts,” said Barry O’Mahony, a senior staff systems engineer at Intel Corp. who has been attending the g.hn meetings. “This has potential to get traction as a next-generation offering, so we’re taking a long serious look at it,” he added.
Other companies active in the group include BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Broadcom, Intellon, Panasonic and Texas Instruments. The Intel engineer said technical requirements for the spec could be set by a February meeting in Geneva with a final standard possible by the end of the year. (from EE times)

Lets see now. People could own a gigabit capable router that fits their individual needs, that interfaces with any network, and then could just shop around for the best deal? Why not?