For years, the computer industry has tried and failed to interest consumers in home networking. The major obstacles-high costs, the lack of standards, and difficult-to-use technology-have now been largely overcome, but one major sticking point remains: the lack of buyer incentive. With today’s under-$100 prices on printers and scanners, peripheral sharing is not a pressing need; files can be shared via e-mail, and few households need to share applications. There is one commodity, however, that is in high demand: Internet bandwidth.
Companies have started to ship new “gateway” devices that let housemates share bandwidth-and, in many cases, multiple phone lines-throughout their homes. Most of today’s products from vendors such as Alcatel, 2Wire and ShareGate are designed for digital subscriber line, or DSL, connections, but cable-modem gateways are on the way from Motorola and others.
Bandwidth sharing is automatic-if one user is surfing the Web, and a second logs on to another linked computer, each receives half the available bandwidth. When one user logs off, full bandwidth is restored to the other user. With most gateways, you can also activate up to four new voice lines and easily reassign them when phones are added or moved around the house. A portion of the overall bandwidth is allotted for each virtual phone line in use, but the bandwidth is usually made available for Internet access again when the phones are hung up.
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