Superconnected

(2 of 3)

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.