India Telecom

October 19, 2005
Home networking is a rapidly growing trend

Yogesh Kamat

NEW DELHI -- Most people tend to think of storage, if and when they think of it at all, as an afterthought - something that's “just there”. But the truth is that without storage there would be no personal computing as we know it. More and more people are beginning to consider storage as an important component when purchasing a new computer or other device that requires a hard drive.

Storage makes it possible to retain data that would otherwise be lost whenever a computer is shut-off. And hard disk drives, because of their cost / benefit ratio, are the most widely used form of computer storage. It is logical then, to extend the benefits of these drives to home networks, just as business enterprises do with their networks. If a single printer can serve several different individual computers in the home, why should storage be any different?

Remember when TVs were a novelty? Maybe not, unless you're of a certain age, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when you could have been first on your block to own one. Today, many houses have them in practically every room.

Home computers have followed a similar trajectory. They started as a hobby for a few "geeks" 40 or so years ago, and today - well, they're not as plentiful as TVs yet, but it's quite common to find two or more PCs in a single home. According to IDC, at the end of 2000, more than 20 million US households had more than one computer and the number continues to grow. In fact, by 2007 as many as 30 million US households are expected to have home networks.

Computers differ from TVs in several ways; one of the most important being that they can communicate with each other. That means they can be networked, and with so many multiple-computer houses these days, it isn't surprising that home networking is a rapidly growing trend. Worldwide, the predicted figure is 60 million.

Bringing people together

We know that new technological capabilities frequently alter behavior. For example, before TV came along, home entertainment consisted of activities like listening to the radio or the record player, looking through photo albums, or playing card and board games - activities that tended to draw people together. Contrast that with today's home entertainment. When you have TVs throughout the house, each member of a family can be in a different room watching a different show at the same time.

Home networking is by definition sharing, and sharing draws people together, if only digitally. With a home network, people have simultaneous access to the same digital photos, music, documents, printers and Internet connection. This naturally leads to interactions between those people. Family photos are displayed on the living room TV, husband and wife exchange tax-related data electronically; housemates use the same printer for homework, recipes and maps, and kids play games against each other online. People doing more together may be an unintended consequence of the networking revolution.

Along with this new connectivity comes the need for a convenient, cost-effective place to store shared data. The obvious answer is a networked hard disk drive. As we start connecting and sharing data with each other, it is less efficient to store sharable content on individual computers than to keep it in one central place where anyone can access it.

Inevitably, if it is stored here and there, the file you want is on a computer other than the one you're on, and getting to it is doable but tedious.

The economics are certainly compelling. Home computers often are sold with 40GB drives, which seem like a lot of storage at the beginning but soon fill up. The usual solution is to add another drive, either internally or externally. However, with today's large-capacity drives, a savvy home networking shopper can save quite a bit by purchasing one networkable drive to upgrade the storage of all the computers in the house in one thrifty swoop.

In addition to the economic advantages, a networked drive is more useful because it lets everyone extend the shareability of their data, play games that allow multiple users at different computers, and protect the family's "digital heirlooms" (family photos, videos, etc.) and personal data. Today's networked drives are extremely easy to set up and use. They're designed with computer novices in mind. They're also expandable, with USB ports and built-in print servers allowing additional storage and/or printer sharing.

Enhancing connectivity!

The idea of sharing data worries some people. They're afraid that something important could get deleted by mistake or, if it's sensitive material, viewed by the wrong person. But these concerns can be alleviated by the use of password protection. Each user can have his or her private area on the shared disk drive for protecting selected data (parents can control kids' passwords if necessary). And the data will actually be safer than before, because the networked disk is more likely to be backed up on a regular basis.

As a matter of fact, the ability to back up each of the computers on the network - and, if desired, to make certain that they're all backed up on a regular basis is another advantage of sharing a hard drive on the network. Backing up can also be accomplished on external drives attached to individual computers, but requires each computer user to do the necessary backing up.

It's a new world of connectivity, enabled and enhanced by advances in consumer electronics. The differences between cell phones and cameras and music players TVs, DVRs, and games are blurring, and everything is going wireless or interoperable (or soon will be). People play roles in virtual game worlds, inhabit chat boards, leave e-mail and voicemail and instant messages, watch family photos and videos on the TV, and embed their thoughts in voice and video files that they attach to other documents. "Only connect," the novelist EM Forster said, and his words may be an epigram for our time.

(The author is country manager, Indian Subcontinent at Maxtor)