The home office could be a great place for networking because of new physical media being introduced under the industry mantra of "No New Wires." It's a simple idea: You've got electrical outlets on every wall, you've got phone jacks in every room and you've got license-free radio spectrum on which you can place data. Why not run your data on what you have, and skip the wiring hassle?

After all, home offices don't need a lot of bandwidth to share peripherals and an Internet connection. In their first generation, "No New Wires" technologies will meet the most basic needs, delivering 1 or 2 Mbps between devices. That amount of bandwidth delivers a passable network connection, but one that is by no means invisible to the user. It's convenient, but not transparent.

Hitting Home Yet the first generation of products will fail to address the biggest home-networking difficulty--distributing entertainment. The tough problem for the consumer is interconnecting audio-visual systems, such as distributing a signal from cable TV POP (point of presence) or satellite dish to the television set. While I'm skeptical about the much-hyped convergence that merges PCs and TVs, PC-based DVD players offer top-quality output for half the cost of their component-based brethren. Of course, nobody puts a TV next to a PC. Nobody wants to gather around the PC to watch Titanic, either. I, for one, don't need my wife crying into my keyboard.

If I want to interconnect high-quality A/V streams, I need lots of bandwidth: Three to 8 Mbps for DVD or other high-quality MPEG-2 stream, and a whopping 19 Mbps to start pushing HDTV signals around. For this blazing speed I still need high-grade wire, and the FireWire protocol (IEEE 1394). I also need certainty that my connections will work flawlessly no matter what else is happening on the network. In other words, I need QoS (quality of service), and the first generation of home networking products won't deliver that. We'll have to wait until the next wave for products at this kind of speed using standards with No New Wires, which won't happen until at least late 1999. (If you're willing to do something proprietary, you can push that up to early 1999.) And it's unlikely we'll see one best technology win the market right off the bat.

Going With What You Know? The home electrical system is the most common existing cable plant, with several drops per room in the typical house. Imagine plugging into any wall outlet and getting a fast, clean data connection. You might even get data communications passed right over the AC power cable. Sounds great, but forget about it. Electrical lines are noisy, standardization is a mess and an electrical connection is highly insecure without higher-layer encryption--especially in multi-dwelling buildings.

To date, most power-line-based home networks center around device control using the X10 protocol. This is in the interest of creating the "smart home" (or, as I see it, a conspiracy to make light switches and thermostats more complicated). I, too, want to avoid the push-button fatigue that so cruelly struck Jane Jetson, and I don't want to diminish the importance of controlling toilet-water temperature from the comfort of my PC, but X10 provides no real data channel, so it's a dead end.