A comparison of competing broadband in-home technologies

Connecting each house to a broadband access network represents an unprecedented opportunity to offer added-value services and broadband Internet access to residential users and expand the customer base beyond the corporate environment. Home networks, however, may be the last barrier to end-to-end multimedia service provisioning. Although a large number of houses have PCs, modems or multimedia network-enabled appliances, the majority are not equipped to support their interconnection, and most consumers are unwilling or cannot afford large-scale home rewiring. This paper reviews the available home-networking technologies and provides a comparison of the competing broadband in-home technologies. The focus is on technologies that do not require rewiring the home, either reusing the existing wiring or using wireless technology. The paper also discusses the residential gateway (RG) initiative, which provides a single point of convergence between the in-home and the access networks.