New Network, New Home - networks add functionality and future value to new homes - Industry Trend or Event

LUCKY YOU: PLANNING A CUSTOM-BUILT home complete with a brand-new home office. Soon you'll be scooting your chair across static-resistant, scratch-proof laminate floors to grab books from built-in shelves. You'll have so many convenient wall outlets that you'll give away all your power strips to plug-hungry friends on moving day.

But as you're dreaming up all the bells and whistles your budget can hold, make sure to include a home network. By now the hype surrounding off-the-shelf home networking kits is burned into your brain--sharing Internet access, files, and peripherals, among other things. But adding a network to new home construction is even more compelling. While the walls are open, network contractors can lay a customized, structured wiring system throughout your home for about a third of the cost of a similar setup in an existing house.

Wire your home with the future in mind, and you'll have all the bandwidth and connection options you could want for years if not decades to come. Here's everything you need to know about building a wired home from the ground up.

WIRING 101

Because networks add functionality and future value to new homes, Home Automation EMagazine (www.hometoys. com) editor Bob Hetherington predicts that home networks will become as commonplace as plumbing in new construction: "The question is no longer, `Is cabling necessary?', but `What's the minimum cabling requirement?'"

Although proposed data-savvy revisions to the Residential and Light Commercial Telecommunications Wiring Standard have yet to be ratified by the Telecommunications Industry Association, most network equipment vendors and installers agree that a good basic setup--one that affords plenty of room to grow--includes two coaxial video cables (RG-6 cables) and two Category 5 network cables, run to every room of the house.

Category 5 cabling is preferred over less-expensive Category 3 wiring, because it can carry data and voice signals at speeds up to 100Mbps, making it ideal for Ethernet networking and high-speed Internet technologies like DSL. Dual coax cables let you run cable TV and video anywhere in the house, and are also useful for delivering cable modem service and future technologies such as HDTV.

While traditional telephone installations are daisy-chained in a linear configuration, the ideal layout for network cabling is a star pattern, with the wires from each room running directly back (or home-run) to a centrally located control panel or wiring box. The box is typically located in a closet or basement near the point of entry for phone and cable service, which makes tying these into the network more convenient.

There are several advantages to wiring your house this way. For one, your phones will never again be subjected to the spaghetti-style installation of new extensions. Because each Category 5 cable can support up to four voice or data lines simultaneously, it's easy to activate phone extensions throughout the house or in specific rooms with just a few tweaks at the wiring closet.

The jacks are modular, so you can add phones, PCs, televisions, and other devices to your network anywhere at any time. And from a maintenance standpoint, home-run cables are more reliable than a daisy-chained network setup, and make it easy to change your network configuration or address problems from a central location.

A JOB DONE RIGHT

If you're sold on the idea of adding a structured wiring network system, Hetherington says you should be willing to spend extra time and dollars on design: "Alteration by eraser is a whole lot cheaper than by sledgehammer."

Be sure to consult with a system integrator or network consultant, especially if you have plans to incorporate other future-looking elements, such as speaker wire, a security system, home automation features, or conduits in the walls for future cable installations.

Master-planned communities that advertise networked homes have their own specific wiring requirements. For instance, if you're building a home in Sienna Plantation, a master-planned community in Missouri City, Tex., you must have at least one Category 5 cable and one RG-6 coax cable star-wired to a minimum of four room outlets in the home, as well as cabling for Sienna fire and alarm systems. Make sure the contractor you hire is aware of any such rules. Whenever possible, work with someone who has experience installing networks in the community.

If you're on your own--building outside a planned community, or working with a general contractor who has little experience with home networks--visit the Web sites of vendors such as Lucent, IBM, or OnQ Technologies to get referrals to local certified installers. Once you have a list, sit down with two or three different contractors and design a system that suits your budget and future networking needs.

Final costs for a complete home networking system vary with the complexity of the wiring, number of outlets, and labor costs in your location. In the Boston area, for example, running coaxial video cable and Category 5 cabling for telephone and data throughout a new home costs between $150 and $200 per outlet, or roughly $1,200 for an average-size home.

Maxtor Bypasses PC With Home Network Drive

Maxtor Corp., the world's No. 3 disk-drive maker, sees a promising new market selling hard disks that act as home-entertainment hubs whether or not they are connected to a personal computer.

The new system, which Maxtor is set to unveil on Wednesday, makes the company the first hard-disk supplier to begin marketing its product as a home-entertainment center that can bypass PCs and allow consumers to watch movies or play music or video games.

"It is truly an entertainment device without a PC in the equation," said Paul Streit, director of product management at Maxtor's branded products group.

Maxtor, based in Milpitas, California, is best known for making the 3.5-inch disk drives that store data on desktop computers. With the launch of its Shared Storage Plus storage hardware, the company is bypassing the personal computer, traditionally the heart of home computing.

"They are preparing themselves for being a digital hub for the home," said David Reinsel, director of storage research at market research firm IDC.

When connected to a home network, the new drive acts as a digital entertainment media center. For example, one family member could listen to music in a room upstairs while another watches a movie in the living room and a third views a slide show of vacation photos on a laptop in the kitchen, Maxtor said.

Consumers can use the hard drive to manage different music playlists in up to 10 rooms of a house. For movies, separate family members could be watching up to four different movies at a time, Streit said of the multi-tasking capacity of the device.

The Shared Storage Plus drive relies on media-management software from Mediabolic. By relying on industry standards that allow an increasing number of consumer electronics gadgets to easily connect together, the hard drive and related software can essentially do without a PC as its central intelligence.

About 18 million U.S. households use home networks, Maxtor said, with another 7 million planning to own one by 2007.

The Shared Storage Plus drive comes in three sizes: 200 gigabytes, or billion bytes, costing $300; 300 gigabytes for $400 and a higher-capacity 500 gigabyte model to be introduced in October for $500.

The new product is essentially a software upgrade of existing 200 or 300 gigabyte hard drive models introduced earlier this year, which were marketed as a means for home and small business PC users to automatically back up data.

Owners of these existing hard drives can download the home entertainment hub capability for free, the company said.

The home network function puts Maxtor ahead of disk-drive competitors such as Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital Corp., Streit said. "We are definitely the first product out with this," Streit said.

CopperGate and Ucentric team up for home IP network entertainment applications solution

CopperGate Communications, a developer of chipset solutions for home networking, and Ucentric Systems, a leading provider of home media networking software for the digital home, has announced a joint Internet Protocol (IP) network solution for delivering whole-home entertainment applications using existing coaxial cable and phone lines. CopperGate's CopperStream technology, in production today, has been integrated with Ucentric's Whole-Home Media Software Suite to enable a highly reliable IP network capable of distributing high-definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) broadcast quality video sessions.

The resulting system is ideally suited to Ucentric's highly popular Whole-Home DVR (digital video recording) application, Whole-Home Music, and distribution of photos to multiple display devices throughout the home. The integrated solution, which enables telco and satellite service providers to significantly cut consumer premises equipment and installation costs while increasing entertainment service offerings, will be featured at the upcoming International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005 in Las Vegas, January 6-9.

"Ucentric has built a home entertainment platform that greatly enhances the consumer's digital home entertainment experience, and at a cost that operators and manufacturers can easily adopt," said Gabi Hilevitz, CopperGate CEO. "We are pleased to work with them to deliver a flexible system that uses a high speed IP backbone in the house to deliver high quality video, data and voice services on a secure and dependable network."

CopperGate's CopperStream products can carry 128 megabits per second of data over both coaxial cables and phone lines with up to 90% user data throughput. Guaranteed QoS provided by Automatic Bandwidth Allocation (ABA) ensures delivery of data streams with predefined bandwidth, latency and jitter. These products are the first to comply with the HomePNA 3.0 specification, an extension of HomePNA 2, an ITU Standard.

"CopperGate's industry-leading home networking products allow the distribution of multiple broadcast quality HD video streams--the essential and most difficult challenge for physical layer technologies to meet--over combined phoneline/coax networks. The availability of a mature, cost-efficient technology to support multi-session HD is a significant enabler for the New Digital Home," said Michael Collette, Ucentric chief executive officer. "Our combined IP-based system for the Digital Home can now deliver a future-proof solution that meets today's requirement and is built to expand to allow providers to support growing consumer demand for applications and services in the home that require this sort of bandwidth."

Ucentric's Whole-Home DVR application creates a single recording library, shared among multiple television sets that allows users to independently record, pause, play, rewind and fast forward live or recorded programming from any TV in the network. Additional applications available from Ucentric include Whole-Home Music and Whole-Home Photo applications that allow users to access, share, and transfer their complete digital music and photo collections to any connected device in the home.

Ucentric is a provider of networked media server software and applications for the new digital home. Its patented technology enables the secure, high quality digital distribution of HD and SD video signals from broadcast, satellite or cable sources to all connected rooms in the home. The Ucentric solution is uniquely capable of unifying networked television, including whole-home DVR with networked personal media (music, photos, home movies) and networked communications (broadband internet access and telephony)--all on a standards-based, cost efficient, interoperable IP networking platform that can easily scale to support any array of applications.

D-Link Rolls Out High-End Network Hub for Home/SOHO Market - D-Link DI-714P+ 2.4 GHz broadband router - Brief Article

Testimony to the increasing sophistication of home networking options, hardware vendor D-Link announced its new DI-714P+, a 2.4 GHz broadband router with support for enhanced 802.11b+ offering speeds of up to 22 mbps. The $189.99 router also includes an integrated wireless access point, dedicated print server, four-port Ethernet switch and hardware firewall. It also includes parental control and filtering features, as well as stateful packet inspection (which checks incoming packets and rejects those not requested by a client on the network) to resist hacking attempts. The unit is part of Irvine, Calif.-based D-Link's AirPlus line, which uses chipsets and Packet Binary Convolutional Coding technology from Texas Instruments [TXN] to boost Wi-Fi speeds while maintaining compatibility with existing 802.11b networks.

Wireless in minutes - B.E. Reviews - setting up home network - Brief Article

Looking for a quick, pain-free way to set up a home network? Consider the Actiontec Wireless-Ready Cable/DSL Router and 802.11b Wireless Card. Actiontec has made it simple for those who quake at the thought of setting up a home network. The router has color-coded cables and ports, so you can easily see which connection goes where. Additionally, the product comes with an "installation buddy" that guides you through the process with detailed, step-by-step instructions and photos that give users visual as well as verbal cues on setting up the router. The process was so easy, we were finished before we even realized it.

We also connected the Actiontec 802.11b PC Card, which let us roam and surf with ease. As with the router, setup was a snap, taking roughly 10 minutes for both products as long as you carefully follow the installation instructions. If you've been thinking about building a home network, but think it might be difficult, consider the combination of the Actiontec Wireless Ready Cable/ DSL Router and 802.11b Wireless PC Card.

Don't rush out to purchase the latest wireless network products until you make sure your PC can handle the job. Check for the following:

1. A network interface card (NIC) in all the PCs you plan to network

2. The necessary hard disk and memory space

3. The right operating system (check the box for requirements)

4. High-speed Internet connection

Home networking annoyances; how to fix the most annoying things about your home network

This troubleshooting guide offers solutions to the hundreds of little problems that can arise when installing and running a Windows-based home computer network connected via Ethernet, phone line, power line, or wireless antenna. It covers routers, managing users, mapped drives, file sharing, network printing, shared internet, firewalls, wireless security, the backup process, and compatibility issues.

Cisco joins partnership to introduce outdoor Wi-Fi mesh network in Cleveland

A new public-private partnership to introduce free outdoor Wi-Fi mesh services to neighbourhoods in Cleveland, in the US, has been announced by Cisco Systems Inc (Cisco) (Nasdaq:CSCO), a supplier of networking equipment & network management, and OneCommunity, a non-profit organisation.

Cisco said the mesh network will provide a 'digital bridge' for residents, enabling them to access education, job placements, healthcare and government services online.

The company is working with OneCommunity, Time Warner and Sprint to establish the network, which will allow residents, organisations and businesses to access the Internet and use OneCommunity's services, free of charge.

OneCommunity is working with local universities, libraries, hospitals and churches to provide an on-ramp to the project for those without computers. It claimed the network will provide access to new services, such as remote healthcare management, which will have a positive and quick effect on the local community.