flux@microsoft.com

he day after you buy that second computer for your home is the day you will want them networked. At first, they won't necessarily be networked in the conventional sense, with cards and wires tying the machines together. The first network will probably be SneakerNet—passing diskettes between the two boxes. Sooner or later, though, you'll be tempted to try a lower-latency-style network, and if the two machines are in the same room, the job is fairly simple. Just buy two $25 network cards, a 10baseT crossover cable, and you're done. The operating system isn't really an issue. Most OSs these days have built-in networking support.       The problem comes when the machines are in different rooms. Then you have to start making trade-offs. There is always the "wire the house" approach. It's cheap, since you get to use those $25 LAN cards and CAT5 cable is a dime a foot. The problem is you're going to spend at least one full weekend under the house, crawling where no human has gone in the last few years—not to mention drilling holes through the floors and pulling CAT5 cable everywhere. Frankly, since I'm no Bob Vila, I'm not a fan of this approach.       This leads me to discuss one of the burgeoning markets today: innovative home network solutions. Companies are trying various solutions, although the two that are getting the most press are networks that use home phone lines and wireless networks.       The phone line networks have some advantages over wireless. They can be faster than an otherwise equivalent wireless network. Also, the network nodes are usually cheaper than wireless and have a longer range. The designers of these systems tend to be going for the simplest of setups. Both Intel and Diamond Multimedia have phone line networks that connect using the USB port on your PC. Both also have units that connect via your PC's parallel port.       My problem with phone line networks is that the phone lines are frequently not where the computers are. I still have a temporary phone cord running under the carpet from my kitchen to my Replay TV box because there isn't a phone jack near the television. Making this setup permanent would lead me back to crawling under the house, pulling wire.       Instead, I'm working with Proxim's Symphony wireless home network system. The line includes an array of wireless cards, ISA, PCI, and PCMCIA, as well as two types of base stations, a 56Kbps modem station and an ethernet bridge station. Neither of these base stations is required, however, since the network can be configured as a peer-to-peer setup.       Symphony provides up to 16 stations on a 1.6Mb wireless network. Symphony cards aren't compatible with Proxim's more expensive RangeLan network, but RangeLan wireless cards can be used in a Symphony network. The Symphony cards have a 150 foot range—enough for most home setups.       Proxim's 56Kbps modem station is an interesting item. Proxim understands that a primary use for a home network is sharing an Internet connection. The modem is a standalone unit that can dial out to your ISP. Since the modem is on the network, it can be shared by all the systems on the net, regardless of their OS. The ethernet bridge is also a standalone unit. This box is designed to bridge a Symphony network into a standard ethernet network without the need for a dedicated PC as the gateway.       The cards are simple to install. These days, the problem isn't installing the card, it's finding a free IRQ. But the issues are fairly straightforward. The manual and the configuration tools for the setup were written for Windows® 95 and Windows 98. However, you can usually get Windows NT-combatible drivers for many cards.       The real problem with these networks is the setup. It seems that any nontrivial network is a pain to set up and maintain. Any trivial network doesn't really do what you want. I spent far too much time configuring and now maintaining this network—and this is a network connecting PCs with fairly good OSs that include diagnostic tools for debugging problems. Imagine laymen trying to network various devices around the home, such as the mythical Internet refrigerator.       In fact, today you have to have a good reason to go through the hassle of wiring together machines that are scattered around the house—a shared Internet connection. This is a compelling reason, but do you want your children browsing the Internet from their bedroom or from a more public place in the house?       Today there's no need to connect PCs just to share a printer. Its easy to find a $200 printer that has great quality, decent print speed, and prints in color. Buying an extra ink jet printer for your kid's bedroom is less of a hassle than trying to wire that machine to the printer in your home office.       Home networking will truly come of age only when networks are self-configuring. Both Microsoft® (with Universal Plug and Play) and Sun (with its Jini technology) are working toward this goal. It will be a great day when one or both of these technologies is universally accepted and implemented. Until then you are left with tying together disparate networking technologies and topologies with whatever tools you can find. And that, frankly, is a great reason to avoid networking your home PCs today.

From the December 1999 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.