LISTEN To This Issue.
            Give those eyes a rest...

Quote of the Week.
            Remember when kids would not give up their TV or telephone?

A Billion Here, A Billion There...
            An amazing number of transistors...

No New Wires.
            Powerline networking - a hands-on review of this latest home & small office networking choice.

"NOW We're Talking Useful Technology!"
            A less pedestrian promise of nanotechnology and "embedded" man-machine interfaces...

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

 

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Quote of the Week.

 

Our changing world:

"According to a study from Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research, one-third of children ages 8 to 17 say the Internet is the medium they would choose if they could only have one, topping television, telephone and radio.

For boys, television was a strong second choice, though girls ranked TV third behind the net and telephone."

Who'd have thought, just a few years ago...

From the April 10 edition of
Ken Rutkowski's Daily Tech News Clicks
and eMarketer
http://www.emarketer.com/estatnews/estats/
edemographics/20020410_kids.html
 

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A Billion Here, A Billion There...

 

This picture,

in an Aug. 13 AnandTech article brought to our attention by reader Sander Olson (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1677&p=2), shows a wafer which is actually about the size of a pizza.  But this high-tech pizza, produced by Intel using its new 90 nanometer fabrication process, holds one-third of a trillion transistors! 

The individual chips within the wafer each hold 52 megabits of SRAM cache, and are destined for new versions of the Pentium.

A billion here, a billion there -- and pretty soon we're talking REAL chips...  (With apologies to Senator Dirksen, who, it turns out, may not have actually penned his oft-quoted version of this saying - http://www.dirksencenter.org/featuresBillionHere.htm).

Moore's Law continues its march onward!

 

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No New Wires.

 

Home networks, according to the Aug. 15 Stavance R&D Newsflash, have recently reached the 10.5 million mark worldwide, and are expected to grow to 16.6 million by 2006. 

Many of you have been on the leading edge of this trend, first pulling cable for 10 megabits/second Ethernet (often called 10bT).  Or you may have dabbled with HomePNA networking (see below).  Or more recently, you may have climbed on the 10 megabits/second wireless networking bandwagon under the moniker of WiFi or 802.11b.  But you probably haven't yet experimented with networking that uses the existing electricity wires in the wall (the power line) to carry data.  Because power line networking is a relatively new home and small office option, in this issue we'll see how it works, and try to put it in perspective alongside other, more familiar networking contenders.

Let's begin by reviewing the common home and small office networking technologies so that we have a sense of their strengths and weaknesses:

-         10bT (Ethernet, or Category 5) wire is, for all reasonable purposes, very secure and delivers a pretty error-free 10 megabits/second of raw data (or ten-times greater, if your network cards support 100bT).  But you have to pull a wire to every spot you want a PC.  If you use an "Ethernet switch" at the central point where all the wires come together, then the full media speed will be available to each device (a "hub," instead of a "switch," shares the media's bandwidth among all PCs).  Each PC requires an Ethernet card (if one isn't built-in), or something like a USB-Ethernet adapter.   Most cable/DSL "modems" provide an Ethernet jack. 

(Note that for all of the network configurations we'll be discussing in this article, not only do you need a network adapter on each PC, but you also need one more "box" if you want to share your cable/DSL connection -- a "router."   It could be a standalone box, a part of the cable/DSL modem, or even a PC running the appropriate software.  For this discussion though, we'll assume that the router is a part of the cable/DSL modem.)

-         HomePNA (http://www.homepna.org) piggybacks data onto your existing home telephone wiring (without interfering with phone calls).  Until recently, it ran at only one to two megabits/second, but its V2 devices are now rated at 10 megabits/second.  You plug a HomePNA "modem" between each PC and a phone jack in the wall, and the PCs are then networked together.  If you have a cable/DSL modem/router, then another HomePNA modem goes between the cable/DSL modem/router and a phone jack. 

However, according to Intel technical support (Intel is one of the manufacturers of HomePNA devices), encryption is not a part of the current HomePNA products.  Because the signals degrade over distance, this may not be a huge security risk in a rural area, but in high density apartment buildings most phone lines show up on a common "punch block" where unencrypted signals could be siphoned off. 

HomePNA devices are available as PCI cards, USB adapters, and Ethernet to phoneline "bridges."  (See http://www.dlink.com/products/DigitalHome/
Hpna/HomePNA-SetupDiagram.htm for one vendor's example of what a network using a combination of 10bT wired Ethernet and HomePNA might look like.)

-         WiFi, or 802.11b (http://www.weca.net/), offers 10 megabits/second of data and the ultimate in flexibility, especially where wandering notebooks are concerned.  You connect a "wireless access point" to your cable/DSL modem/router via an Ethernet cable, and then "wirelessly-enable" each PC or notebook with a built-in PCI card, a PCMCIA card for notebooks, or a USB adapter.  But depending on the building layout and construction, its coverage can be spotty, and documented flaws in the current WEP encryption make it susceptible to hacking (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,82563,00.asp and http://www.weca.net/pdf/20011015_WEP_Security.pdf).  

See http://www.dlink.com/products/DigitalHome/
Wireless/11b/2-4GHzDia.htm for one vendor's depiction of a wireless network configuration. 

New systems, based on the 802.11a standard (the reason that the "a" version is the higher-speed successor to the "b" version is bureaucracy at work...) raise the raw data rate from 10 megabits/second to 54 megabits/second.  Unlike the "b" version which shares its radio spectrum with (and can get interference from) microwave ovens and "2.4 gigahertz" cordless phones, the newer 802.11a moves up to the relatively un-crowded 5 gigahertz spectrum, and it provides a potentially more robust level of encryption.  Note, though, that these two wireless standards are NOT compatible with each other.  If you have a notebook with an 802.11b card in it, it can not talk AT ALL to an 802.11a access point.  If that type of backwards compatibility is important to you, there are access points that include both 802.11b and 802.11a functionality.

Which brings us (finally) to the main point of this discussion -- an introduction to the relative newcomer to the home and small office networking arena:

 

Power Line Networking. 

Under the standardizing influence of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance (www.homeplug.org), several companies (http://www.homeplug.org/members/) now offer products that use the existing electricity wires within our walls to carry data at a maximum raw data rate of 14 megabits/second, without affecting the power.

(One company, PhonexBroadband, explains that the overhead associated with networking over the very data-unfriendly power lines reduces that "raw" 14 megabits/second to an effective data throughput of 8 megabits/second (http://www.phonex.com/pdf/Neverwire%2014%20FAQ.pdf), but more on the speed issue in a moment.)  The recommendation for maximum distance between powerline modems seems to be about 150 feet, although HomePlug indicates that they have yet to run into a house where it didn't work.  And a practical (if not an absolute) limit of 16 powerline modems seems to be what's claimed for home or small office powerline networks.

Similar to the other technologies, you need a "powerline modem" between your cable/DSL modem/router and the wall, and another powerline modem between each PC and the wall; various companies make versions that connect to an existing Ethernet jack, to a PC's USB connector, or that can be installed into a PCI slot.

I recently had the opportunity to test powerline modems from three companies, Asoka (http://www.asokausa.com/prodlist.htm), PhonexBroadband (http://www.phonex.com/prd_nw14.htm), and ST&T (http://www.stt.com.tw/PLC/plc-1.htm), and I must admit that I went into the testing more than a little skeptical -- my electrical system is so "noisy" that my few X-10 lights often exhibit a mind of their own.  But -- the powerline modems did indeed work, and quite well.

 

Behind The Tests.

Unlike the carefully controlled benchmark-driven tests conducted by many "testing laboratories" (which are also valuable), I focus on pragmatic real-world testing that uses the same type of equipment you probably have, configured in similar ways.  For example, I don't use PCs stripped of all of their background tasks to keep normal CPU activity from affecting test results (although I do make an effort to see that no unusual activity takes place during the tests.)  And for these file transfer speed tests, I didn't configure an FTP or other specialized server.  Instead, I used Window's File Sharing and Explorer's "drag and drop" to copy a large 338 megabyte (aprox.) test file between the two systems in the same way you'd likely transfer a file.  Tests were conducted in both directions and repeated twice, with the results averaged.  So while absolute test numbers might be better in optimized environments, these results reflect how I would expect the technology to actually work for you.

For most tests I used powerline modems from the same vendor, one attached to my cable/DSL modem/router and the other to the test PC running Windows XP; each powerline modem was plugged into a different electrical circuit (meaning that the signals had to travel down to the circuit breaker box and back up.)  The second PC in the file transfer tests was connected by wired Ethernet directly to the router, and used Network Neighborhood to gain access to the test PC.


Installation.

Powerline modems that connect directly to an Ethernet jack, either on a cable/DSL modem/router or to an existing Ethernet jack on a PC, didn't require any setup or software install at all -- they were transparent to the machines.  Installing a USB version did require a typical software installation, which proved flawless on a Windows XP machine.  However, when I originally attempted to install the ST&T USB software on a "well-used" Windows Millennium system, the installation process repeatedly failed and eventually corrupted the system.  This may have been more an indictment of the state of this old Windows Me machine than of the powerline modem software, and I didn't pursue it since this seemed a good time to upgrade the machine to Windows XP. J   But all of the powerline modems did work fine under XP.


The Results.

To begin, I ran a benchmark file transfer between the two systems using only standard wired 10bT Ethernet (no powerline modem), resulting in an end-user throughput of 7.2 megabits/second.  (Don't be surprised that wired Ethernet doesn't live up to its "raw data rate" promise of 10 megabits/second -- protocol and operating system overhead always take a toll on the "end-user data rate," which is why we're going to be comparing actual end-user file transfer performance.)  For comparison, a previous similar test of 802.11b wireless Ethernet (high signal strength and only one wireless PC active) yielded an end-user throughput of 7.0 megabits/second.

I then installed pairs of powerline modems and tested the file transfer throughput as described above, yielding the following end-user data rates:

Asoka PL9610-ETH / PL9710-USB   4.0 megabits/second
PhonexBroadband NeverWire 14         4.6 megabits/second
ST&T M51 / U21                                4.9 megabits/second

10bT wired Ethernet only                      7.2 megabits/second
802.11b 10 megabits/second wireless   7.0 megabits/second

 (You may well experience faster or slower speeds, depending on your electrical system.)
 

Analysis. 

The most important result of this experiment, to me, is that these powerline modems provided exactly what they promised -- simple, no-new-wires networking.

You might be concerned that the end-user data throughput of the powerline modems (in my tests) was slower than wired or wireless Ethernet, but let's put that in perspective -- if you do intend to transfer large files or expect to stream lots of multimedia at speeds faster than your cable/DSL connection, the increased speed of wired Ethernet might well justify the hassle of pulling cable.  But for most typical small network activities, such as sharing a cable or DSL connection, remote-printing, and typical file transfers, the slower speeds of the powerline modems may be unnoticeable compared to the flexibility of being able to compute anywhere you can plug-in to an electrical socket.

 

Security -- Just Say "Yes!"

 One caveat, is that out-of-the-box, the powerline modems all implement a very basic level of security, which some manuals such as the one from PhonexBroadband, clearly (and correctly) call "not adequate protection for your network." (http://www.phonex.com/pdf/NeverWire14_Users_Guide.pdf)   Happily, each modem came with a mechanism to implement a more robust 56-bit DES encryption, although the method to implement it varied. 

For the Asoka and ST&T devices, it was trivial to use a software utility to set your own personal encryption key for powerline modems that were directly connected to the PC, either via USB or by a PC's built-in Ethernet jack.  The problem, however, is if you need to set the encryption key for a powerline modem that normally connects to the Ethernet jack of your cable/DSL modem/router, if your PC does not have an Ethernet jack.  You'd have to install the encryption utility on another PC that did have an Ethernet jack, temporarily plug the Ethernet-only powerline modem into it, and then set the encryption key to match the others.

This ability to set your own key should allow you to set the encryption keys on different vendors' modems to the same value and have them interoperate with each other.  In my case, however, I was not able to get this to work.  It "should," and it "might" if I'd pursued it further, but at least initially I'd plan on using a single vendor for powerline modems until their interoperability becomes more robust.

Which brings us to PhonexBroadband "NeverWire 14's" method of setting security -- it's much more elegant.  To set the robust security on the NeverWire, you pick any one device and hold down its Security button for 5 seconds.  This generates a random key and puts it into a special "master" mode for five minutes, during which time you go around to every other NeverWire and press its Security button for about 2 seconds -- it then exchanges key information with the "master" (over the power line, of course) and gives you a visual indication of success.  Very simple and effective; no encryption utilities needed, and no special hookups are needed to set keys on powerline modems that are not connected to a PC.  (If you want to set the NeverWire 14's key to an explicit value, PhonexBroadband's Jess Howe advises that the utilities supplied with other HomePlug powerline modems should work, and PhonexBroadband may provide their own utility in the future.)

 

Power To The People!  (OK, it's a bad pun, but I couldn't help myself...)

Speaking of "power," there's something you (should) have to UN-learn when plugging a powerline modem into the electrical socket -- do NOT plug it into a surge suppressor, UPS, or any other device that filters the power line!  Yes, that makes sense if you think about it, but if you've developed the (important) habit of never plugging sensitive electronics directly into the wall, that habit might affect your network. 

(To find out what would happen, I initially moved just one of the two powerline modems onto a surge suppressor, and the data rate dropped by 66%!  When I then plugged the second powerline modem into a surge suppressor, the two suppressors filtered out enough of the powerline modem signal that they couldn't establish any connection at all.)

 

The Bottom Line.

The bottom line is that powerline modem technology works, and better than I had expected.  Yes, it's somewhat slower than some other techniques, but for many applications the network speed will not be the bottleneck.

Powerline networking could be even MORE useful if it were bundled WITHIN computer equipment -- imagine if every PC and related device were equipped with this by default, so that simply plugging it into the wall for power also brought along local networking!   (Of course this would be hard on surge suppressor vendors, as we saw earlier...)  

 

But Not A Bed Of Roses.

The possible fly I see in the powerline networking ointment, however, is the number of years that it has taken powerline networking to get here (I recall a fair amount of hype about powerline networking three years ago at COMDEX), and the tremendous price reductions that have happened to wireless networking devices during those years: 

-        Today, three PhonexBroadband Neverwire 14 powerline modems (enough to share a cable/DSL Internet connection with two PCs) costs $387 ($129 each).  An equivalent set of three powerline modems from ST&T would cost $265, or $267 from Asoka.

-        A similar 10-megabits/second 802.11b wireless system that I priced today on BestBuy's Web site, which includes a wireless access point PLUS router (DI-614+ at $150), a notebook PCMCIA wireless card (DWL-650+ at $90), and a wireless PCI card for a desktop (DWL-520+ at $99), costs only $339.

-        Even a new 52-megabits/second 802.11a wireless setup, consisting of a wireless access point (DWL-5000AP at $269 after a $60 mail-in rebate (honest, that's what it says at http://www.bestbuy.com/Detail.asp?m=
488&cat=540&scat=1572&e=11121267), a compatible notebook PCMCIA wireless card (DWL-A650 at $150), and a compatible wireless PCI card for a desktop (DWL-A520 at $170) would only cost $589.

I haven't had the opportunity to test the D-Link 802.11a high-speed wireless cards I priced above, but I have been very pleased with the original 802.11b wireless networking which I've used for years, and so I anticipate that 802.11a will be even better. 

Yet there's still plenty of room for powerline networking -- as with most technologies, there are situations where each will shine, and I expect that the price for powerline modems will drop as they ramp-up production. 

The really good news for us is that we now have so many, relatively inexpensive home and small office networking choices!  It wasn't too long ago when powerline networking was a pipe dream and wireless access points were in the economic stratosphere.  Today, as consumers, we have access to both. 

Happy networking!

 

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Please send your comments to me at  Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com  .

I look forward to hearing from you!

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Jeff Harrow

 

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"NOW We're Talking Useful Technology!"

 

Finally, following up on our recent exploration of future histories and where technology may lead us (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020812/20020812.htm#_Toc16827507), reader Michael Johnson decided to offer his own interpretation of how NBIC convergence (Nanotechnology, Biology and medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences) might be put to good use:

"I read the short paper by Roger Born (http://writing.borngraphics.com/1future.htm) with great interest.  As I was sharing the idea with my co-workers it dawned on me that if you had retinal bots sending signals directly to your brain, you could program them to "adjust" the signal coming from, say, your girlfriend, to look like Demi Moore.  An overlay of sorts.  She, in turn could overlay the Tom Cruise program on you.

Even better, you could just project your preferred wireless image to all receivers within range.

This could eliminate dieting!  Go ahead and eat that extra piece of pie (at least it looks like pie... it could be cake for all you "know"); no one will be able to tell.

Today I would like to be 6 inches taller.

Assuming you had bots around you auditory system you could even have the sound adjusted to match your new physique.

NOW were talking useful technology!"

I'll bet THAT technology would sell!

 

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