From...

November 22, 1999
Web posted at: 10:39 a.m. EST (1539 GMT)

by Dan Miller

(IDG) -- Home networking isn't just for turbogeeks. Some 17 million households in the U.S. now have multiple PCs. And network kits that enable users to share printers, files, and (most important) Internet connections without first having to acquire a degree in network administration have been on store shelves for more than a year.

But few people are buying those kits. One reason: They are slow. With a maximum throughput of 1 megabit per second, the first home LAN products were pokier than their office counterparts. Buyers savvy enough to want a home network are likely to look askance at 1 mbps.

For these skeptics, the new 10-mbps home networking kits warrant a look. NetGear's Phoneline10X PCI Adapter is the first to hit the market. Like their 1-mbps predecessors, these products transmit data over existing phone lines in the walls of your home.

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If you want a 10-mbps home LAN but don't have a phone jack near every PC, you'll soon have other options. By year's end, expect to see a new generation of 10-mbps wireless networks that use radio frequencies instead of wires and carry family-friendly prices.

Home LAN Hands-On

We installed a Phoneline10X card in each of two old Pentium-75s and found that the resulting network functioned as advertised. Like the first generation of home networking kits, NetGear's comes with software intended to let networking neophytes set up a LAN without worrying about IP addresses, gateways, or other arcana. After installing the cards, we simply popped in the accompanying CD-ROM, clicked OK a few times, and voilˆ, we had a network.

Once both Phoneline10X cards were up and running, we could open Windows' Network Neighborhood on one of the PCs, locate the other system, and start transferring files. Sending a 30MB image file from one machine to the other took about 50 seconds, versus 10 minutes with a first-generation 1-mbps product and 10 seconds using an up-to-date office LAN (which uses a mix of 10- and 100-mbps hardware). And you can still use your phones when the phone lines are sending data.

Sharing a printer is nearly as easy: In the preproduction version we tested, we used the Add Printer Wizard (from the Control Panel) to handle this task; NetGear says a desktop icon in the shipping version will automate the process. To share an Internet connection, you just tell the NetGear app which PC has the modem (the product supports standard dial-up connections as well as DSL and cable). Thereafter, the modem automatically dials when you fire up your browser from any PC on the LAN.

NetGear plans to sell the Phoneline10X kit, consisting of one PCI card and the necessary software, for $99 list (about $80 on the street).

As noted, NetGear is not alone. 3Com, Diamond Multimedia, D-Link, and Intel are introducing 10-mbps kits of their own; expect their pricing to be similar to Netgear's. Dell plans to offer a $69 10-mbps phone-line networking option on its Dimension desktops in time for the holiday season.

Better Home LANs

These new phone-line products are part of a miniboom in faster home and small-office networking. The next big development will be fast, cheap wireless LANs. Compaq and 3Com plan to offer 11-mbps wireless networking cards by the middle of next year. While 11-mbps wireless networking is nothing new, the prices of these next-generation wireless cards (roughly $200 per node) should be about half those of wireless options today. Meantime, 3Com and Microsoft offer the HomeConnect Ethernet kit, designed to make setting up a 10-mbps LAN with traditional ethernet cabling feasible for home users.

As home networks, broadband connections, and intelligent devices proliferate in homes nationwide, even 10 mbps is likely to fall short. That's why Broadcom (a co-author of the 10-mbps phone-line spec and a key chip supplier) is at work on a 100-mbps chip set. Products should begin appearing in 2001.

Do you need more than a 1-mbps network? If you want your home PCs to share a high-speed DSL or cable connection, the answer is yes. Ditto if you want to network more than three PCs in your house, or if you plan to shuttle huge files between computers. Otherwise, 1-mbps products should suffice--especially at the lower prices they're likely to have after their 10-mbps counterparts hit the market. Several vendors--Intel among them--say 1 mbps will remain the standard, and 10 mbps will be pitched as the premium. If you're among the holdouts who snubbed wimpy 1-mbps home networking products, you may want to consider the new 10-mbps offerings that deliver more muscle, albeit at a higher price.