The Future of Multimedia Home Networking
The typical home network today is data-based and PC-centric, and currently emphasizes applications such as sharing printers and Internet access within a house. While these networks provide a great deal of functionality to tech-savvy house. holds, they are of limited interest to the typical consumer. A more widespread application will be needed to entice the mass market to home networks. Audio and video seem to be the most likely candidates to draw the average consumer into home networking.
A recent survey conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) found that 61 percent of respondents liked the idea of being able to watch cable or satellite TV on any television in the home. And 59 percent of consumers surveyed by the CEA favored listening to music in any part of the house.
However, moving audio and video streams is much more difficult than moving data. Audio, and especially video, require both a great deal of bandwidth and the ability to deliver in real-time, which is not required in the world of data.
A number of possibilities for standards may play a part in multimedia home networks, including IEEE 1394, Fast Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, and IEEE 802.15.3, an emerging wireless personal area network standard.
IEEE 1394 is the most viable standard for making multimedia home networking a reality. It provides high-bandwidth and isochronous, or real-time, data transfer in a peer-to-peer network. The 1394 ports are being installed on large numbers of advanced consumer electronics, from digital televisions to advanced set-top boxes.
Currently, the major stumbling block is the limited distance allowed between nodes in a 1394 network, which has had the effect of limiting 1394-enabled products to a single room, thus rendering it irrelevant as a home networking technology.
However, new specifications are near approval that will allow 1394 to become a true home networking technology. This should allow audio and video data streams to be transported around the house. And it is possible that standards may be combined to create a multimedia home network.
In conclusion One possibility might be several audio/video clusters throughout the house, with a variety of 802.11 used for room-to-room transport. However, the rollout of multimedia home networks is expected to be slow, with only a limited number of 1394-enabled consumer electronic devices connected to multimedia home networks over the next three to five years.
According to a recently released Cahners In-Stat Group report, "Multimedia Home Networking: IEEE 1394 and the Competition," by 2005 well under 10 percent of 1394-enabled consumer electronics devices sold in that year will become constant home network nodes.
