Making Home Networking Easier

from the slowly...-but-surely dept

Home automation and home networking are topics that people have been talking about for years - yet always seem to get pushed into the "early adopters only" bin. That might be changing. The main reason isn't so much (as some had originally thought) the desire to do home automation, but the simple fact that more and more households have multiple computers - and want to be able to share network connections and other peripheral devices like printers. The problem, of course, is that home networking for computers is not user-friendly (an understatement). At the same time, consumer electronics companies have been trying out all different methods for simplified home networking, so that now, if you want to wire up your home you have plenty of different confusing standards to pick from, each with their own tradeoffs. However, the two sides are coming together and realizing this is a much bigger market if it can be made easy. So, consumer electronics companies and computer companies are looking for ways to create very easy-to-use, easy-to-understand ways to network a wide variety of home devices. These things will still take time, but it sounds like companies are finally working towards a (mostly) common goal, instead of squabbling over which device is going to be the "hub" of the "smart home".