Home networks have become one of the hottest topics of technical discussion today, accelerated by the growing availability of high-bandwidth Internet connections, the increasing number of homes acquiring second PCs and the popularity of multi-player games. While home networking has yet to gain a firm foothold outside the United States, as many as one-third of US households with PCs are interested in building a digital network, according to a recent study from the Yankee Group.
Says Attie Pienaar, branch sales manager of D-Link South Africa: "Creating a networked home is becoming more simple, especially considering the number of companies working together to bring easy-to-use, high-speed, affordable solutions to consumers by providing tools to utilise home phone line networking."
A host of new products, driven by the ability to use telephone lines to shunt data around the home and to share an Internet connection, are being introduced to South African consumers. "In fact, home phone line networking technology is speeding up, bringing a faster 10 Mb/S (megabits per second) technology to phone line networking," he says.
Home networking solutions allowing users to connect multiple PCs in the home using existing telephone wiring are fairly easy to install. The network cards are designed to plug into the PC`s PCI slot, and then into the normal telephone jack in the wall. Since the network cards operate at a different frequency from normal telephone operation, both network activity and telephone use can occur over the same lines simultaneously.
"Once the network solution is installed, users can then share their individual resources, such as file and application sharing between PCs, and the ability to print to another machine," explains Pienaar. "Basically anywhere you have a phone jack, you can network your computer."
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