Home, Sweet Digital Home

NEW YORK--Imagine 20 Web cams, enough bandwidth and cables to wire a small town, and a smorgasbord of digital gadgets all jammed into one swank two-story Manhattan apartment. It could pass as Bill Gates' New York bungalow, but it's not. This digital home is 3Com's vision of the connected life.

On display off-site during the PC Expo, 3Com's digital home wires everything. Each computer seamlessly talks to printers and fax machines, and effortlessly roams the Internet. Entertainment devices such as a NetTV and Internet radio are networked so you can easily download movies or music and pipe it to any room. The house senses your presence, its cameras following your every move so that anyone watching the network can see what you're doing. Even the telephone is patched into the home network, allowing you to forward calls to any phone or paging device.

This is not a vision of the farcical future. If you've got the money, the bandwidth service, and the patience to set up the network, you could be living the 3Com connected life.

Closing the Loop

However, here's the reality check: when it comes down to it, few people besides tech hobbyists want to spend their weekends untangling wires and programming network gear designed for small businesses and office buildings. Tech support needs deter most people from wanting to actually live in a digital home.

But attitudes are changing. Cahners In-Stat Group predicts a 105 percent growth in home networks sold to consumers, who will buy more than 6.4 million units by the end of 2000. And 3Com and others want a piece of the action.

3Com is pushing ahead with home-networking technologies that it says are designed to be simple, practical, and inexpensive. The company has a slew of products available today, as do competitors like Intel, Diamond Multimedia, and Lucent Technologies.