Gregg,
Hi. I agree for DELL to move ahead they need to participate in the Home Networking market. Here's an article from tomorrows IBD on the current state of that subject.
Putting Home PC Networks To The Test
Date: 7/29/99
Author: Ted Needleman
For the last two years, home networking has seemed on the verge of being the next big thing.
Homes with two or more computers are now common. And several manufacturers have been promoting radio-frequency networks, as well as networks that transmit data through a home's electric power lines.
So far, though, there have been few takers.
The market's slow start doesn't worry members of the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance. The advantages of linking home computers and peripherals are clear, the alliance says.
You can quickly move files between computers, share expensive peripherals such as CD-ROM drives and printers and even access a single Internet connection from multiple PCs.
Plus, all the wiring that's necessary for the network is already in place in most homes, the alliance says. The group advocates the use of existing phone wiring to send data between computers.
Both telephones and data can share the same lines without interference. Most voice communication on telephone wires takes place between zero and 4 kilohertz. Data travel at much higher frequencies, generally between 5 and 9.5 megahertz.
Among the various home-networking approaches, using phone lines to link PCs appears to have the most support.
Investor's Business Daily tested home-networking kits from four vendors: Actiontec Electronics Inc.'s ActionLink, Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc.'s HomeFree Phoneline Network, Intel's AnyPoint and Zoom Telephonics Inc.'s Zoom-HomeLAN.
Home- networking packages consist of adapters or cards that attach to PCs. The gear lets you share peripherals such as printers and allows several computers to access the Internet simultaneously through one connection.
And all phone-line kits that meet the standards set by the networking alliance are supposed to be compatible. That means a PC with a card from one company will work with equipment from another. In testing, this generally was true - with one exception.
The problem had to do with the software that lets multiple users simultaneously log onto a single Internet account. Different manufacturers use different - sometimes conflicting -software products for this purpose.
The solution to this problem is simple. Build your network from a single company's cards, or just don't install Internet-sharing software when networking with gear from different manufacturers.
Otherwise, the phone-line networks worked very well, consistently transferring data at about 1 megabit per second, or about a tenth as fast as many office networks operate.
We were easily able to play multi-user games and send documents to printers attached to other PCs on our home network.
There were some minor differences between the four kits we tested. The Actiontec ActionLink and Diamond Multimedia HomeFree were both plug-in adapters, which means you'll have to open up your PC and have an open PCI-style expansion slot to install them. They both cost about $100 for a pair of cards.
Zoom Telephonics Zoom-HomeLAN cards were also internally installed PCI cards and cost the same. But they also offer 10Base-T Ethernet capability - a network standard common in office networks.
So, with the Zoom gear, you can mix phone-line and standard Ethernet networks, though you can't run both networks at the same time.
At $189 for two adapters, Intel's AnyPoint was the most expensive of the four kits we tested. But it was the only one that's available in a parallel-port version. That means you can plug it into the back of your PC, without opening up the case.
IMO DELL should take the lead here in a very important market.
Best,
Steve |
