Consortium Has High-Speed Plans

Industry consortium Home Phoneline Networking Alliance will unveil a technology standard today that lets data run over home telephone lines at 10 times the speed of the current standard and not interfere with existing services.

The standard, which would be built into electronic devices that use phone lines, is based on technology developed by Broadcom Corp. in Irvine, with assistance by Lucent Technologies Inc. in New Jersey.

The consortium’s standard allows data to travel over a home’s internal phone lines at 10 megabits per second, or the equivalent of sending the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from one computer to another in a second.

New products that use this new standard are hitting retail shelves now and will work with devices that incorporate earlier versions of the standard, said consortium officials.

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.