Sprint offers home networking

(Telephony) Sprint today unveiled its first home networking offering at the Consumer Electronics Show 2001 in Las Vegas.

The Sprint ION Home LAN (local area network), available this month with the Sprint ION service, uses Home Phoneline Networking Alliance standards to connect all computers or Internet appliances in a home to ION’s high-speed data access, currently provided via DSL.

To utilize the service, customers purchase a bridge for $139 and adapters costing between $42 and $82 each for each device connected to the network. The self-installed equipment, plugs into phone jacks, giving each device up to 10 Mbps of speed within the home network.

According to Jeff Luther, director of broadband applications and services for Sprint, the company’s goal is not simply to allow for the creation of wired homes or to have the computer become a near universal device, but to increase the value and utility of other appliances within the home.

“We will be trying to take advantage of the thing customers are already going to purchase…We’ll be enabling those devices to actually get additional value to the customer.”

To that end, said Luther, Sprint is currently working with application providers to provider home networking services that go beyond basic connectivity. In the future, he said, a computer hooked up to home network could download a movie that could then be transferred to the television for viewing.

Though Sprint’s home networking offering is currently limited to markets in which the ION package is available, Luther said the company will expand availability in the near future to include Sprint FastConnect DSL, available in areas where Sprint is the local service provider.

In addition, Sprint Broadband Direct, the company’s MMDS offering, is currently working on a wireless LAN for the home, a technology that ION may take advantage of in the future.

This technology-agnostic approach of Sprint, said Luther, indicates the company’s view that home networking is not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end.

“One technology isn’t necessarily right for everybody,” he said. “What you can do with that technology is the more important thing.”