You may be forgiven for thinking that the fight for the network space was won long ago by Cisco. And right now, you’d be absolutely correct. They have set the benchmark in networking appliances for years with their switches and routers. However, more recently Juniper Networks announced their own brand of network kit and HP has offered some quality networking kit under their “ProCurve” branding.
But that’s not the whole story – wireless technologies have swept the broadband scene as it seems that every ISP is offering a wireless router with sign up to their data packages. This made the recent announcement from Intel, Panasonic, Texas Instruments and Infineon all the more interesting.
Together they have decided to formulate the “HomeGrid Forum”, whose purpose is to investigate a method to bring existing coaxial, power line and phone line technology together to transmit data across the home. As an example, the use of the electricity cabling throughout your home to transmit movies from your media server to your TV. Whilst sending data down electricity cables is already possible, the “HomeGrid” initiative is to investigate further uses of this technology and to deliver it in products to the end-users.
It is an interesting theory, which if it works will alleviate the need to run multiple sets of cabling, all for different purposes throughout your home and will help control the price of copper cabling. But with wireless technologies already becoming popular, have the “HomeGrid” team missed their opportunity?
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