The Growth of Home Networking

The Yankee Group estimated that the number of home networks will grow at approximately 95% to reach about 10 million homes by 2003. The major growth factor is broadband connectivity. When you only had access to dial-up, you were lucky just to be able to surf the Internet and have Web pages come up every few minutes. Imagine what your connection speed would have been like had you shared that one modem connection with several other computers in your home.

Home networking is all about sharing your access with other computers in your home. You might have a computer in the home office, one in the kid's room, and another in the family room. Broadband Internet access brings speed and reliability to all these computers at the same time, all for one low cost and ease of configurability. The Internet is becoming increasingly multimedia based, and speed and bandwidth are required. Broadband access provides these things.

The majority of home network access will be over DSL and cable modem, although wireless networking is starting to catch on and will continue to eat up its share of the market. Wireless networking does not require Ethernet cables or any other form of cabling to connect computers over a network and makes connectivity very simple in homes and offices. The Yankee Group estimates that by 2003, an estimated 5 million broadband homes will have gateways set up for routing home traffic to the Internet.

Home networks can easily be wired using existing telephone lines for DSL or through existing cable connection for cable modems. The cost, outside of the ISP connection fee and monthly charges, can be rather cheap. As mentioned in Chapter 11, “Securing Your Standalone PC: Broadband Connections,” the costs are minimal and the technology is easy to implement. To network a few computers in the home through your broadband connection requires only a couple of network cards, some cables, and networking software. A Frost & Sullivan report, “U.S. Home Networking Markets,” says the growth in the home networking space will continue to grow because of inexpensive and easy-to-understand products.