New technology Makes Networking at Home Easier

By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Mercury News

I never dreamed of being a network administrator. But gradually, that's what I've become as first one, then two and now three computers share a single high-speed Internet connection in our home. And a growing number of other devices -- our Xbox game console and TiVo digital video recorder -- are vying for connectivity, too.

The networked home seemed a futuristic fad six years ago, when we built our house. So we never even considered stringing high-speed wiring -- known as ``Category 5'' cabling -- that would have made connectivity a cinch. Like many networked homes, ours is a cobbled-together affair, with each piece of hardware added to address a specific need.

A single cable modem sufficed for the days of the lone PC, used to check e-mail and get online. We installed a hub to share the Internet connection with a second home computer. And, more recently, we added wireless access to connect our son's iMac to the Net, without incurring the cost of wiring his upstairs bedroom.

Now we're faced with a new networking challenge: how to add a game console and a TiVo to the network. For this, we've selected a little-known category of networking products that uses the home's existing wiring to create an invisible -- and inexpensive -- home network.

It was the first truly painless addition to our home network: one that required no configuration, and no extra security measures to prevent neighbors from freeloading on our high-speed Internet connection (as occurred with our wireless network, before we enabled access-thwarting encryption).

The idea behind the home-plug technology is to exploit a network that already exists in American homes -- the electrical wires -- to send data. All it requires is a pair of Ethernet bridges that plug into the electrical outlets -- one at the wall socket nearest the cable or DSL modem, the other near the device you're adding to the network -- to send information from point to point at high speed.

Think of it as a modern version of old tin-can-and-string telephones we made as kids, only with promised data rates of up to 14 million bits of information per second.

The one product I tested -- Netgear's Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge -- afforded a true plug-and-play experience. I was able to add our Xbox game console to our high-speed network without hassling with DNS server addresses, subnet masks and other configuration minutia.

It simply worked.

The only drawback is the potential for interference. Drills, vacuum cleaners and hair dryers create interference or ``noise'' on power lines. Anyone who's attempted to watch television while someone else is using a hair dryer has witnessed the fuzzy consequences. The microwave oven puts even more noise on the power line -- the little-known cause of reception problems for the kitchen cordless phones.

The power-line products have been designed to identify such sources of interference and adapt to it, while maintaining an Internet connection, said Matt Rhodes, president of Conexant Systems, an Orange County chip maker and member of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance.

I didn't encounter any interference problems with our Xbox -- then again, I didn't take Rhodes up on his suggestion that I grab a drill and bring it to the bedroom to see if it would knock the game console off the Internet.

The bigger obstacle for home-power-line networking products may not be the issue of interference -- but obscurity.

Only about 1 percent of the nation's 11.7 million networked homes use home-plug networking, according to IDC, a technology researcher in Framingham, Mass. Wireless home networks, by comparison, are already in more than 6.1 million American homes, with an additional 30 percent of households expected to add WiFi by year's end.

It's hard to imagine power-line networking eclipsing WiFi, which affords greater flexibility and mobility. But that's not to say that the two networking technologies can't co-exist under one roof.

The home-plug networking is a great way to extend the home network to fill in the dead spots that WiFi can't reach: in our case, the backyard patio. And it's a cheaper, easier way to add certain types of devices -- say, security cameras -- or even deliver high-speed access to a growing class of Internet-dependent consumer electronics products, such as the Philips Streamium, a boom box that tunes Web radio stations.

It doesn't take too much imagination to envision home-plug networking as an inexpensive way of providing Internet connectivity to an emerging class of refrigerators, microwaves, washing machines and other appliances that might go online to help diagnose problems and schedule maintenance.

Of course, wireless technology is evolving quickly, with miniature radio repeaters to fill in transmission gaps, and miniature WiFi bridges to bring Internet connectivity to individual devices.

But power-line might be the right answer for those of us who don't want the headaches of properly configuring a wireless network. After all, not everyone aspires to being an unpaid network administrator.

Source: http://www.bayarea.com/