Articles and whitepapers

7/5/2003

Wired or Wireless?

By Mike Wingrove

House developers are now looking at offering IT-ready homes, but what does an IT-ready home involve exactly?

Developers have years of experience in taking an area of land, providing an infrastructure of roads, power, gas, water etc, and in less than a year, families start to move into the finished homes, complete with landscaped gardens. Developers keep to a very tight budget, but their customers demand more and more: fitted kitchens with appliances, fitted wardrobes, fitted bathrooms, fitted carpets.

Now that customers are also demanding IT-ready homes as standard, there are two tracks the developer can follow, namely wired or wireless. If they go down the route of wireless, they have nothing more to do - simply supply a phone point and a 240V socket on the wall, and they can claim that their houses are IT-ready!

Wireless Systems

As computers and software become more complicated, the need for bandwidth, which determines the rate at which information can be transferred between systems, becomes more and more critical. Wireless systems typically have an operating speed of 11Mb/s (11 megabits per second or 11Mbps) and each wireless system will typically require a station (computer), and a central hub. The cost of connecting a station is around £80, and a central hub costs from £100 - so the cost for just one system would start from around £180.

Wireless systems have a place in the world of computing, and within the home where an IT infrastructure has not been installed during the build process or home renovation project, but there are limitations. Quality of service is not guaranteed and is affected by many factors. These include auto speed sensing (automatically selecting the most suitable speed) which could result in a system running at 1Mb/s instead of the full 11Mb/s, and frequency allocation problems if living close to neighbours who also have wireless systems.

Other influences can affect the wireless system. The quality of service can be degraded due to the building materials used, such as metal foil-clad wall boards and metallic components, which can all act as a shield to stop the wireless radio waves from passing through. High frequency systems such as lighting, microwaves and motors, and even the children's train and race car sets, can also cause unwanted interference.

Wired Systems

The cost of networking up to five PCs using a 9x faster (100Mb/s) system, via cable that has already been installed and included in the cost of a house, would be four network cards at £12.00 each, plus a five-port Ethernet switch at £30.00. This makes a total of £78, which is less than the cost of a single wireless network card.

Where a cabled system does not already exist, the cost of wiring a home has dramatically fallen over the last couple of years. A small family home can be fully installed and IT-ready with a TV distribution system, from as little as £600 - giving phone, Internet, satellite TV, and computer networking, in every room.

A wired home can allow a CCTV camera at the front door to be viewed on any TV within the house, a telephone system to be installed that allows phone calls to be transferred to different phones around the house, computers in the kids' rooms, where they can play interactive games with each other, or watch TV through a TV card or the Internet.

The technology used for cabling has been proven over many years. Cable manufacture and development are coming on in leaps and bounds, and hardware now exists to allow 1000Mb/s networking over standard Category 5e cable systems (see article: Structured Wiring).

Conclusion

As computing technology develops rapidly and software gets more complicated each day, the more bandwidth is required to network computer-based devices. Mini hubs, switches and routers are very reasonably priced and allow very large networks to be created cost effectively - which is why businesses continue to install cabled networks within office blocks.

While the wireless option is suitable for people who want to move around - perhaps coming home from the office with a laptop computer and sending email back to the office and to customers - the wired house option, for the time being, is the more open-minded way forward to the IT-ready home. In addition to the bandwidth advantages and guaranteed quality of service, a wired system can be used very much as a unique selling point. Also when letting a home, if the property is cabled, it is less likely that the fabric of the building will be damaged by the resident installing a network themselves - and perhaps consequently pulling it out!

Mike Wingrove is Director of ACA-Apex Ltd, manufacturer of home networking products including the CRIS (Compact Residential Infrastructure System) and CMOS (Compact Mini Office System) product ranges.

Telephone 01525 220782
mike@wingrovem.fsnet.co.uk
www.aca-apex.com