Bumpy ride to whole-home networking

Early adopters think nothing of chucking last year’s gear; consumers are another story.

When people ask me what home network gear they should buy, I always say, “Wait a while, the really cool stuff is just around the corner.” But now that some of the really cool stuff is finally here, that answer’s just not flying.

But to me, a router’s not just a router. It’s a market vision expressed in design, chipsets, specifications and interfaces. In packaging, documentation and price.

Tech Spy gives me the chance to figure out what’s really going on – and what it means to you and yours. Clues to where this market is headed are evident in all sorts of little choices vendors and industry leaders make along the way.

For instance, Sonos is developing a whole-home audio system that uses wireless mesh network technology. Very cool, but what got me most excited? The four-port switch built into the controller box. What do I need four ports for? I’ll figure that out later. Sonos was thinking smart.

For the most part, consumer electronics companies don’t think about ports or connecting things, so they’re slow to build Wi-Fi radios and Ethernet ports into their TVs and stereos. For the most part, we’re seeing Microsoft’s Media PCs, media adapters and media extenders: gear that cobbles together consumer electronics and PC equipment.

But early stuff is kludgy; media extenders, whose job is simply to “extend” media streaming from your Media PC to a second TV via 802.11g, are huge. They need to be alarm-clock-sized, or better, integrated into the TV.

In Japan, Sony sells a TV with an 802.11a interface. Here, the first entertainment networks rely on the PC as the center of the universe. A hint that Windows might not be the best platform? Toshiba has built a mini version of Linux into its Qosmio multimedia laptops that loads media instantly – no waiting for Windows to boot up.

Today, the “digital home” isn’t really here. It won’t actually arrive until we’ve got a stable, ubiquitous, high-bandwidth network backbone in place to stream content to all our home devices; or until we can stream our content to wherever we are (car, mobile phone/PDA, friend’s home devices).

In the meantime, we’re buying products we might not want in a year or two. Of course, early adopters think nothing of this. But consumers expect an 802.11g router to last as long as a car.

You’ve got to prepare them for a bumpy ride to whole-home networking – especially if they insist on going wireless. Just as we cozy up to our 802.11g networks, Intel, Linksys, Netgear, HP and Dell have begun pushing 802.11a to stream video. The reason is smart: 802.11b/g runs at the 2.4-GHz band, which has only three channels and is filling up fast. So use 802.11g for voice and data, and 802.11a and its 24 channels in the near-empty 5-GHz band for video.

But not everyone is convinced. D-Link says it’ll add 802.11a when the market demands it. Apple says never. Atheros designed a single chip containing both 802.11a and 802.11g radios, which should drive down cost, but such products are months away.

But wait. Just when 802.11a/g products gain critical mass in 2005, 100M bit/sec 802.11n gear will appear in 2006.

Belkin recently shipped Wireless Pre-N routers and notebook cards with 108M bit/sec data rates. Products are backward-compatible with 802.11b/g gear, but not 802.11a. The Wi-Fi Alliance insists future 802.11n gear will be backward-compatible with both.

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