Getting messy with home networking

From the Duh Department this week comes a survey (OK, it's actually a couple of weeks old) from Parks Associates that found households with a home data network are much more interested in receiving bundled services, voice over IP and networked storage than those who don't have a home network.

This isn't intended to point out that Parks spent time and money to find out something that most people probably knew already. Parks in fact has done some very worthwhile studies on the video market. But what was left out was a huge amount of detail that carriers and vendors must deal with when wading into the home networking arena. The home networking market resembles that hip nightclub in the rapidly gentrifying part of town. You always wonder what goes on behind those doors, and when you finally get the courage to cross that threshold, you find out it's not nearly as fabulous as you thought. For all the great possibilities that home networking offers, most users are simply using a router to share a broadband connection.

What makes the market so difficult for carriers is the lack of (or more appropriately, too many) standards. Wi-Fi of course now dominates the "traditional" home networking market, but that doesn't do anything for video. Try as they might, Wi-Fi and constant bit-rate services like IP video don't get along so well. That's to say nothing of the reaction of studios if they find out a service provider is actually sending their precious, high-value content over unlicensed spectrum.

Coaxsys has gotten a lot of early deals for its technology, which uses in-home coax to ship IP video around, but it's not standards based. The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) is attracting some attention, but it's still some time away from having product on the market. You also can throw in HomePlug and HPNA to the stew.

Taking the next step, even the home automation is a jumble right now with ZigBee, Z-wave and Insteon all competing for attention.

What carriers and vendors are left with is a menu of options that can solve one problem well but lack the ability to do much else. Wrapping up the entire home into a single network, particularly when no one is really sure what the end points are going to be, is difficult. However, it also presents an opportunity for a carrier or vendor to take the lead and put its stamp on the home of the future.

E-mail me at vvittore@primediabusiness.com.