New Standard Assists Setup of Home Networks

Now that personal computers are getting cheaper, it’s becoming more common to have two or more machines in the same household.

But owning two PCs doesn’t mean consumers have to buy double computerized everything--printers, scanners, Internet accounts. Thanks to a recent decision by a consortium of PC companies, a new generation of products will hit retail shelves this holiday season that will allow people to use their existing phone lines to connect their computers and peripherals and create a home network.

Last week, the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance agreed to accept a technology standard, developed by Irvine-based Broadcom Corp. with assistance by Lucent Technologies Inc. in New Jersey, that lets data run over home phone lines at 10 times the speed of the current standard and not interfere with existing services.

Today’s technology allows data to travel over a home’s internal phone lines at one megabit per second, or about 20 times the speed of a 56K modem. The new standard will boost that to 10 megabits per second, or the equivalent of sending the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from one computer to another in a second.

The benefit of the new standard for consumers, analysts say, is a boost in technological convenience.

“This is the future of broadband,” said Tony Zuccarino, marketing director for Broadcom’s home networking division. “You can do more without worrying about bandwidth limitations.”

Of course, it also means a slew of new market opportunities. Companies including Broadcom, Intel Corp. and 3Com Corp. expect to roll out products using the new standard by the end of the year, officials said.

Industry watchers expect the home networking market to boom in the next few years, blending wireless, copper-line and other broadband technologies together. Analysts with the research firm Cahners In-Stat predict that sales for “residential gateways”--a computerized server in the home that would handle a variety of electronic tasks--will hit $2.4 billion by 2003.

Lucent and Broadcom, whose wholly owned subsidiary Epigram Inc. created the 10-megabits-per-second home network technology, will be able to charge a licensing fee to other chip makers that want to use it. But the bulk of Broadcom and Lucent’s profits will come from the sale of these chip sets, company sources say.

And because the alliance chose the Broadcom-Lucent standard, they will have a head start over their competitors and be able to ship chip sets more quickly, industry analysts say.