New LAN technology headed for home, I'll take one! <g>
By Tim Greene
Network World Fusion, 10/14/98
The hardware needed to turn home telephone
wiring into cabling for remote office LANs should
be available by year-end.
Rockwell Semiconductor and Lucent
Technologies separately have developed chips
designed to power modems that will support such
home phone networking.
With home phone network gear, PCs and printers
could be connected via already installed telephone
wiring to link phone jacks within homes. Once
networked, the devices could share a printer, for
example, as well as a wide-area dial-up
connection for Internet or corporate network
access.
Internal copper phone cabling is designed to
handle voice, and the new home phone network
technology allows the wiring to support data as
well.
Current home network technology supports 1M
bit/sec of data above the 3,000-Hz range used by
voice, though vendors working together within the
Home Phone Networking Alliance hope to boost
the LAN bandwidth to 10M bit/sec by mid-1999.
Users of home phone network gear will also be
able to work high-speed digital subscriber line
(DSL) and cable modems into the mix. Currently,
home phone network hardware supports only
dial-up links to the WAN. But the new Rockwell
and Lucent chips will enable home phone network
hardware to support DSL and cable WAN links
as well.
DSL already allows a high-speed data path and a
regular voice connection simultaneously over a
regular phone line. Home phone line technology
combined with DSL could enable users to
simultaneously print out an Internet page while
talking on the phone and accessing data stored on
another PC.
The home phone network technology would also
make it convenient for office workers to bring
home laptops or docking stations to access
printers, as well as to call the corporate office or
the Internet, says Lisa Pelgrim, an analyst with
Dataquest in San Jose, Calif.
Home networking requires two types of network
cards. One connects local devices to each other
over the phone wiring. The other performs the
same function, but also includes a modem for
WAN access.
The Home Phone Networking Alliance has set
price goals at $100 for the PC-to-PC card and
$20 for the gateway card. PCs on home phone
networks must run Windows 95, 98 or NT, or
some other software that supports file sharing.
PC manufacturers have expressed interest in
installing home phone network cards in new
systems. 3Com, AT&T, Compaq,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Tut Systems are
among the companies that have expressed an
interest in the technology. |
