Superconnected

By Maryanne Murray Buechner

Todd Thibodeaux, an economist from Arlington, VA., has eight computers in the eight-room house he and his wife Clare share. He wanted all his computers to communicate with one another, just as they would at any corporate office. He also wanted the freedom to work on his website, do a little Web surfing, online shopping or banking from wherever he happened to be--in the kitchen, basement, den or bedroom--without having to wait for Clare to finish surfing first. So last October the Thibodeauxs started building a home network. Three weeks and $950 later, their Ethernet baby was born.

It was not easy labor. It took time and money, not to mention multiple trips to Best Buy, Home Depot and CompUSA, to get the job done. The couple spent hours drilling holes through nearly every wall of the house so they could string Ethernet cable from PC to PC and create wall outlets for those cables to plug into. Thibodeaux also had to figure out how to configure three Macs, three Windows PCs and two laptops so the computers would not just talk to one another but speak the same language. The couple managed to clear all these hurdles and are happy with the results. "With the right instructions," Todd Thibodeaux now says, "anyone could have done what I did."

Yeah, sure. Piece of cake.

Thibodeaux is what you'd call a computer hobbyist, a techno-geek of the highest order--not like the average consumer. There are a lot more of those: people who like the idea of a home computer network but wouldn't want to spend all their spare time (or even one Saturday) reading technical manuals, shopping for parts, reconfiguring hard drives and rewiring the house. If you wanted to network a few PCs a few months ago, you really had to be a Todd Thibodeaux to pull it off--or spend thousands of dollars hiring professionals to do it for you.

But times have changed. A host of new technologies is promising simpler (and much cheaper) "plug-and-play" ways to network computers in the home or small office. What's driving the market is the notion that consumers would jump at the chance to network if only they were given the right tools to do it.

Approximately 21 million U.S. households have more than one PC today, and that number is expected to jump to 31 million by 2003. Working at home is becoming increasingly popular as well: today's 37 million home offices are expected to balloon to 50 million in three years. Meantime, the Internet has become the "killer app" among all PC users, business or pleasure. And therein lies the most compelling reason to set up a network in the first place: to share a single modem and single Internet service.

Sure, there are other benefits, such as being able to share printers, scanners, fax machines and zip drives, and to be able to swap files instantly. But Net access, particularly high-speed access, say industry analysts, will be what really drives consumer demand. New York research firm Jupiter Communications predicts that one-fifth of American homes will have a digital subscriber line, cable modem and other high-speed pipe by 2002. You can bet that everyone in those homes--whether they like to play games, shop, chat, or trade stocks online--will want to share the big bandwidth.

The simplest new way to network is to connect every PC to the nearest phone jack, using standard copper phone lines as the means of communication rather than Ethernet cables. A variation of this "no-new-cables" theme is to plug every PC into the nearest electrical wall outlet to establish communications over existing power lines. A third new way to network is to use wireless communication.

There is a fourth way, which is really an update of a tried-and-true formula: the Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN), specially tailored for the layperson (call it Thibodeaux Lite). Some argue Ethernet connections are still the most reliable. Still, dozens of companies big and small are moving quickly into the unchartered territory of using phone lines and power lines, eager to stake a claim in--or enlarge their existing share of--a market they see as vastly untapped. Considering that only 12% of today's multiple-PC homes are networked, they may be on to something.

Telephone and cable companies providing high-speed Internet services are watching the market closely too. They know that the higher price they will be charging for a Net connection that will replace relatively cheap 56K modems and analog service will be that much more palatable if the fat pipe can be shared by multiple PCs, notes IDC research manager Warren Childs. To help make their case, these telephone and cable companies will start peddling new consumer-friendly home-networking products. IBM and Bell Atlantic, for example, have teamed up to wire 15,000 homes from Maine to Virginia for home networking over phone lines.

The market is so ripe that even Cisco, the largest computer-networking equipment manufacturer and supplier of 80% of the Internet's electronic plumbing, is now eyeing the consumer retail side. Cisco has teamed up with AT&T to provide home networking equipment to its future cable modem subscribers. Virtually every other big tech company--among them Intel, Microsoft, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard--is getting into the game too, promising everything from cheap-and-easy home networking kits to "home network-ready" PCs.

Now the question is, will the magical products deliver?

NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME

"I am not a computer expert by any means," says Chris Blum, who runs a real estate consultancy out of his house in Gilbert, Ariz. "I can get by, but if anything goes wrong, I'm on the phone with customer service." That's exactly what Blum was doing just a few days after he decided to try the PassPort Plug-In Network from Intelogis, one of the first products to network over power lines.

Installation was straightforward, Blum says. It took him about two hours to link up the two computers and a laser printer in his home office. The necessary power cords, adapters and software all came in one box. He plugged power cords into the backs of each computer and the printer, attached the sandwich-size adapters to the opposing ends and plugged them into regular electrical outlets. (The $150 kit also came with extra power strips.) He then installed the software, provided on one CD-ROM, into both PCs. "This was definitely something we were looking for," he says of the new system. "We wanted to be able to share Internet access, transfer documents without having to save them first on floppies, and save large files from one machine to the zip drive we had connected to the other machine. We could do all that using this system." The best thing about it: no circuit boards to install inside the PCs.

But pretty soon Blum's network suffered a major communication breakdown. The computers would crash every time Blum or his employee tried to print a document, and customer service's advice--to uninstall and then reinstall the networking software on both machines--didn't do the trick. Frustrated and falling behind on his professional work, Blum finally disassembled everything and put things back the way they were before he tried networking. "I had been jerking around with it all day," he says, "and I needed to get back to work."

Intelogis told Blum he might download their latest software upgrade from their website and try again, and Blum says he's game. "I haven't given up yet," he says.

Other people might not be so persistent. And that's the problem with today's "cutting edge" home networking products: they can't guarantee that the cheap-and-easy experience won't get tougher along the way. (To be fair, what tech product is ever bug free?) Kinks will be worked out, improvements will be made, and new versions of the Intelogis and every other new type of home-networking product will arrive in due time, just as you'd expect in any other area of consumer technology.

With that in mind, it's still possible to handicap the new players. The phone line networking crowd is clearly ahead of the pack, with more companies backing the technology. Compaq, for one, is selling a Presario desktop PC model already prepped to work with a home phone-line networking system. (See box for information on other products.)

3Com plans to introduce a new line of home phone-line networking kits this summer, but the product it is promoting now uses a traditional Ethernet connection, adapted to guarantee a 15-min. set-up time (or so the company says). Called OfficeConnect, it includes a small, flat box that serves as both the network hub and the modem or high-speed connection for accessing the Internet. Many agree with 3Com that Ethernet remains the most reliable option, particularly for small businesses and home offices with no time to be anyone's beta tester. OfficeConnect looks easy enough, but it still requires users to string new cables and install circuit boards inside their computers. "Those add-in cards pretty much eliminate the casual user," says Bruce Kasrel, analyst with Forrester Research. "A lot of people who own PCs are afraid to open them." He expects to see, before long, more home-networking products make use of a computer's far more accessible Universal Serial Bus if additional hardware is needed.

And yet installation is only half the battle. Computer networks, once they're up and running, also need care and feeding, and the unsavvy will need help when things go wrong. A new industry group hopes to give it to them by developing ways for phone and utility companies to manage household networks externally. "The idea has potential, but I see this as a couple of years off," says Michael Wolf, an analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group. "The best course is still to sell reliable and fail-safe equipment."

THE POST-PC WORLD

Computers are not the only high-tech items in the home that could benefit from a network. Industry analyst Karuna Uppal of The Yankee Group argues that home networking will be even more appealing to householders once the technology is extended to things like TVs, DVD players and stereos, home security systems and central air conditioning. Sun Microsystems is licensing a Java-based technology called Jini that is supposed to offer a no-fuss way to make home entertainment devices and other non-PC appliances part of any home network. Microsoft is working on a competing standard called Universal Plug and Play.

"The three main areas of networking--PC to PC, home entertainment and home automation--are all different," says IDC's Childs. "But eventually they will all merge somehow." Cisco sees its networking software inside everything from TVs to toasters. IBM and Bell Atlantic have said their home networks will be able to include not just PCs but also VCRs and light switches.

Dust off that drill, Todd Thibodeaux: it may be time to get back to work.

--With reporting by Mubarak Dahir/St. Louis

With reporting by Mubarak Dahir/St. Louis