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C O L U M N

Technology Trickle-Up

July 10, 2003
By Mike Lee

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Historically, most information technologies have been developed for businesses and have trickled down to consumers only after they've been established. Exceptions to the rule include mobile and wireless technologies and instant messaging, both of which took the back door into most enterprises. But as the home becomes more of an extension of the office, expect to see this reverse trend continue. One obvious area that will help it along is home networking.

I recently moved to San Antonio, where, after basking in the championship of my new home basketball team, I got down to the business of installing a home networking solution. The wireless setup I had used in my previous house in Washington, D.C., just didn't cut it. My new house is about 80 years old and built with good ol' plaster walls on the interior and stucco on the exterior. The 802.11b signals that made it through my previous house's walls won't penetrate these new barriers, and thus the signal from a wireless access point in the garage won't reach the house. Directed antennas might work, but I would have to create a place for each of them. My choices were to pull Category 5 cable or come up with another solution.

The two main viable options make use of existing lines. The HomePlug Powerline Alliance offers a solution that treats your power lines like data lines; the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance offers a telephone-line alternative.

I decided to install a pair of Linksys Instant PowerLine EtherFast bridges between my garage and home office. While the HomePlug Powerline Alliance says that you'll get data rates up to 14 Mbps, I'm getting 1 Mbps to 4 Mbps--fast enough to keep up with my DSL connection but not an ideal solution if I were to need access through this network to a local server for backups or application data access.

The Home Phoneline Networking Alliance just standardized version 3.0 of its HomePNA last month. It touts 128 Mbps, with optional extensions that push data rates to 240 Mbps. That's not too shabby in theory; we'll see what happens once the implementations start later this year.

Each of these wired and wireless technologies contains QoS features that facilitate streaming content, but the standards are in different stages. For HomePlug, QoS was integrated with version 1.0. HomePNA's latest standard improves QoS to prioritize not only phone calls, but also multiple real-time data streams deterministically. One of the strengths of the HomeRF wireless standard was that it was supposed to support both voice and data for the home. However, given that enterprise wireless LANs are starting to take off, it appears that the standards bodies are going to settle on 802.11e, which would implement QoS for both home and enterprise networks.

Will such home networking technologies, wired or wireless, change the way enterprises are run? Wireless technologies already are making a

difference, security shortcomings notwithstanding. And as the speeds of the other home networking alternatives become comparable to Ethernet's, expect those to take hold at small/remote offices. After all, not every business location comes wired with Cat 5, and any proven and familiar technology that doesn't require tearing holes in walls is a viable alternative.

Help Us Out

Over the next few weeks, Network Computing will be building its editorial calendar for the next year, but we don't want to plot our coverage in a vacuum. Which technologies will you be adopting? What will you be upgrading? What lessons are you learning? Whether your projects are large or small, please write to us about them at the e-mail address below. It's all right if you're not from Texas; we'd like to hear from you anyway.

Post a comment or question on this story.

--Mike Lee, mlee@nwc.com