Many families have a simple but effective home communications network. Transmissions usually begin with a command like this: “Honey, go tell your father that dinner is ready.”
As the number of personal computers in the home increases, however, more families are starting to consider a real network–the electronic kind. Products are or soon will be on the shelves that use a home’s power outlets, its phone lines or plug-in radio transmitters to create instant, easy-to-use networks.
Among other things, such networks could end the squabbles about whose turn it is to dial into the Internet. They also could let the kids play games together on separate computers and allow a family to get by with a single printer in the hallway instead of one attached to every PC.
Surveys show families with multiple PCs are interested in home networks, but the number of people actually buying them has been small and products have been scarce.
What is on the market today is largely aimed at people who don’t mind running new wires through their house. Most current home-networking kits fail the plug-and-play test, requiring users to install network-interface cards in their computers and run high-capacity wires between them. The farther apart the PCs are, the greater the challenge these kits present.
Promising to offer far simpler solutions, a slew of small companies are charging ahead with new home-networking technologies. Many of the computer industry’s heavyweights, including Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Compaq Computer Corp. and 3Com Corp., also are helping to develop products and standards.
A home network would work much like a scaled-down version of the computer networks found in many businesses. A series of devices would be chained together electronically through small plug-in boxes or cards that would pass signals to each other via the phone lines, electric wires or airwaves.
Users would need such a plug-in device for every major element of the chain–each PC and laptop, for example. They could then send files from a PC to the printer, scanner or modem attached to another PC, and vice versa.
Almost all of the available and announced home-networking products adhere to two basic principles: They require no new wires and no technological expertise.
“How do you make it succeed in a society that can’t even program their VCRs?” asked Chris P. Ladas, a vice president at Adaptive Networks Inc. of Newton, Mass. “You can’t have IT (information technology) managers running around your neighborhood. . . . It’s got to be really brain-dead and easy.”
The different technologies do not target the same audience, however; while early products aimed for families who wanted “smart homes” with automated lights and thermostats, the newer ones are focusing on families who want their PCs to share a printer or a phone line.
The latter market is potentially huge. Using surveys from the market research firm Dataquest Inc. in San Jose, Intel estimates close to 20 million homes in the United States will have two or more PCs by the end of this year, and the vast majority of them are not hooked together in a network. The number of two-PC households will approach 35 million in the year 2000.
The Internet’s popularity may prove to be the driving force for home networks. John Coons, an analyst with Dataquest, said the ability to share a single Internet connection among multiple computers is expected to be the main reason people set up a home network.
With a home network, a single computer would open a connection to the Internet through its modem. Other computers then would connect to the first computer, using it as a conduit to pass e-mail, World Wide Web pages and other data to and from the Internet.
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A second driving force behind home networks could be the popularity of sub-$1,000 PCs. Families who buy a second or third PC because of the comparatively low cost may not want to drive up the cost by adding a new printer and other peripherals, said Dan Sweeney, manager of Intel’s home networking unit.
A third reason to have a home network is enabling people to play games together on separate computers, rather than with strangers over the Internet.
Eventually, standards will be developed to help tie power-line, phone-line and wireless networks together into a single home communications system, predicted Steve Guggenheimer, manager of digital TV products for Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. And what consumers gain from wiring all those devices together, he said, is the convenience of summoning information from the Internet anywhere in the house.