Home, sweet home

Without a truly out-of-the-box experience, home networking--at best-is
going to be incomplete. At worst, it will be commercially dead on its
feet

Call me a luddite, but for me, the biggest challenges of business networking can generally be defined as: a) getting your desktop printer to work with your PC and b): getting your presentation to work on someone else's laptop, especially in front of a crowd. I may even have referred to these difficulties before, but they show no sign of going away. In fact, I was reminded of them by a slew of presentations on the subject of, well, home networking, at a recent broadband conference.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think home networking is a good idea--at least parts of it. I can see utility in entertainment and in home monitoring and security. And apparently, according to figures from Forrester, around 25 per cent of broadband subscribers in the US last year had it attached to some kind of home network. So, I am not exactly prescient when making comments here. But by the time the presentations mentioned above were over (and all the speakers faced an uphill struggle working with different laptops), I had more or less convinced myself that home networking wasn't going to happen (at least in the way envisaged) in my working lifetime. The problem, frankly, is not so much if I actually want it or not (that's a complete story in itself), but whether the industry collectively can get its act together to deliver it.

It is not, as they say, a trivial problem. We consumers may look around our houses and reckon it's more or less a matter of cabling up a few of the walls and having something like a scart connection on the back of each device. But in fact there is a lot more to this than meets the eye. Deep in the bowels of this subject we have big interoperability issues.

To be fair, several of the key industry associations driving this, such as the DSL Forum and the Digital Home Working Group, have been aggressively pushing interoperability up the industry agenda with some success. And aggression will certainly be needed to deal with the myriad of interfaces, protocols and formats if the consumer is ever to enjoy a really seamless, out-of-the-box experience. Without it, home networking is, at best, going to be incomplete, and at worst, commercially dead on its feet.

Fixed broadband, even un-networked, is clearly entering the mainstream market. But wireless, in terms of WiFi, is still probably in the early adopter community and could bring more complication still when the homenet is involved. Even some telco broadband executives admit configuring their home WiFi and network is so complicated that they have had to pull in their own engineering departments to do it. Not a good sign. Don't even mention the possibility of billing problems, straight intentional internet theft, and largely unintentional internet jacking by the next door neighbours who may be benefited by your high-speed access and premium movie downloads, and you begin to see the homenet as a Pandora's box. Add in the mix of telco, supplier and installer responsibilities and you'll begin to wonder who actually is responsible in a multi-vendor, networked, broadband environment.

Consumer acceptance in the mainstream market means fundamentally avoiding all of these problems. Fortunately, I see the cavalry this time as the consumer electronics, rather than the telecom, community. Consumer electronics people are, yes, hard-nosed enough to know how to simplify the offering to gain market acceptance and to do it very quickly in aggressively short product cycles. For sure, this market certainly does need aggression. But, I'm still wondering: can we hook up my printer?

Stephen McClelland, editorial director, Telecommunications[R] International

COPYRIGHT 2004 Horizon House Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group