From the Company that brought you ZiVA in Dell, Home Networks(or networks for the home).......................
Billy already posted this, shucks.
techweb.com
Altec Lansing And RF-Link Jump Into Home Networks
(12/05/97; 3:00 p.m. EST)
By Rick Boyd-Merritt, EE Times In the quest for a low-cost home network, two companies are leveraging their wired and wireless technologies to turn home PCs into home servers. Speaker maker Altec Lansing Technologies is working with system and semiconductor partners to bring its Hybrid Home Entertainment System to market next year, and RF-Link Technology has launched its own system, which it plans to respin within the next few weeks.
Both systems would allow TVs scattered throughout a home to display data from a PC running in a separate room. However, both networks are highly asymmetric with huge quantities of video and audio streaming from a PC to a TV, but with a relatively narrow control channel leading from those consumer devices back to a PC. The two companies join other players looking to deliver home networks based on using existing telephone wiring.
Altec Lansing, in Millford, Pa., is working with PC makers to bring its Hybrid Home Entertainment System to market by the third quarter of next year. The system uses installed cable TV coaxial wires within a home to distribute information from a PC -- including anything from DVD movie playback to a Web browser or other PC application -- to a TV. Control signals back to the PC come from a 900-MHz RF remote-control device.
"Our thinking is, why create a war between the PC and the TV? The two should coexist," said Tommy Freadman, Altec Lansing's executive vice president of engineering.
RF-Link has a similar product concept. "The end user has already made a commitment to the PC -- why not extend its systems capabilities to other consumer devices?" said Bill Vitez, director of marketing and sales for RF-Link, in Torrance, Calif.
Altec Lansing is developing two ASICs with semiconductor partners. The company said it hopes partnership will bring the cost of its system -- which would take the form of an external PC add-on box or a PC adapter card -- to an estimated retail price of about $249, Freadman said. The company is still courting OEM partners and hopes to show demo units by the middle of next year.
The company has received a U.S. patent on its method of using coaxial cable to transmit data around the home while using a notch filter to block data from going out of the home.
The network scheme has been in the works for more than two years, Freadman said. The rise of faster processors, true multitasking in Windows 95, and upcoming options to support multiple simultaneous displays in Win 98 is helping finally to push the project toward the market, he said.
The nature of installed coaxial cable in the home -- with the unpredictable use of signal splitters -- prevents the product from migrating toward a true two-way multimedia network. But the company said it hopes the RF back channel could be a kind of in-home teletex for e-mail messages to TV or PC screens. Altec also sells a home intercom system that could be linked to the network.
For its part, RF-Link started shipping late last month its Wireless PC@TV system which sends PC data over a proprietary 2.4-GHz spread-spectrum wireless network to a converter box that translates the VGA display data into an NTSC or PAL format. The RF transceivers on which the product is based had previously been sold as a consumer electronics add-on product named Wavecom Sr., which was positioned as a way to share a single direct-broadcast satellite or VCR signal with multiple TVs in a home.
"This is our first foray into the PC marketplace," said Vitez of RF-Link. "At Comdex this year, we demonstrated the product and started to speak with PC OEMs for the first time."
RF-Link's product includes a pair of wireless transceivers and an infrared wireless keyboard and a VGA-to-NTSC converter box, which runs software to enhance Web pages on a TV screen. The 2.4-GHz transceivers' unique circular-polarization directional antenna provides a coverage area, the company said, of up to 300 feet over unobstructed distances.
At a retail price of $499, WirelessPC@TV will bump up against lower-priced Internet TV set-tops; that's one reason the company plans a quick respin of the product. RF-Link's plans for the Winter Consumer Electronics Show include a version of the product using a 900-MHz RF wireless keyboard. It eliminates the need for some of the IR-to-RF conversion circuitry the current system requires to support the control back channel. That system could also include an upgraded VGA-to-NTSC converter.
RF-Link is selling its product through retail outlets, but is looking for OEM partners to sell or customize its technology for next-generation products. |
