The lure of the one-wire home (10/31/2006)

How many wires will you need to communicate 10 years from now?

The answer to that question today is three: telephone, Internet, and cable TV. But as telecommunications companies have looked for new areas of growth, all of the major telephone, Internet, and cable TV players would like to change all that. Both the cable and telephone companies want to get those wires down to one.

Today, companies like Comcast already have added phone service to their cable TV service and high-speed Internet services in many communities. Similarly companies like AT&T and Verizon are doing big fiber buildouts to be able to add TV service to their existing telephone and high-speed Internet services. These "triple play" services are designed to put all your communications on one wire or fiber and never think about them again.

NETGEAR is working hard to make this happen too. We're already proving solutions like the NETGEAR 108Mbps Super Wireless ADSL Router (DG834GT) to phone companies so that they can distribute their bandwidth within your home for multiple uses, including video and audio. And we're also supplying carriers outside North America with our RangeMax ADSL Modem Wireless Router (DG834PN) that integrates two phone lines right into the product.

The biggest question today then is which connection you want to carry all your household communications.