For "Star Trek" fans (you'd be surprised by how many in the cable industry are closet "Trekkies"), the new show "Enterprise" was a welcome addition to the Star Trek family. So far, it appears to be holding its own as an intriguing prequel to the James Kirk (a.k.a. space cowboy) original. While Scott Bakula of "Quantum Leap" fame may not have been my first choice as the first captain of the first Starship Enterprise, he does exude a type of wondrous awe at the prospects of the new frontier of interstellar exploration.

Recently at the 2001 NATOA (National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors) Annual Conference, I participated in a panel session where we did some group think on one of the new frontiers for the cable and telecommunications industry–home networking. For the uninitiated, home networking is certainly an amorphous subject area, but it can be generally defined as a system that connects and integrates multiple monitoring, control, computing, information and communication devices/appliances in the home. Such a system can be comprised of a few or many elements, including software, hardware, cabling, wireless equipment, processors, etc. One of the apparent axioms of home networking is that the more applications enabled by the home network, the more sophisticated the system needs to be.

A key factor for the cable and telecommunications industry is that connection to an external broadband network makes the home network more useful in two ways. First, many types of home networks have multi-megabits of transfer rate capability. However, the information generated just within the home between computing devices and appliances may use only a fraction of the capabilities of the home network. Consequently, large graphic and multimedia files, Application Service Provider (ASP) services for home offices, links into office client server applications for telecommuters, and other information that can be imported through high-speed connections to the Internet will make the home networking system significantly more useful.

Second, even slower speed applications, such as telemetry-like monitoring and control functions, need connection to an external network to enable their operation. If necessary commands can be delivered over DSL, cable modem and other networks that provide remote access, these functions can be fully enabled, and the usefulness of the home network will be greatly expanded.

That being said, the cable and wireline telecommunications industries face two significant challenges in their quest to both supply the home network with broadband services and serve as the linchpin within the home network for distributing those services.

First, wireless broadband technology is forecast to continue to gain ground on the current wireline leaders. By most accounts, 3G wireless systems work well and have a significant advantage based on the convenience and utility of 3G's inherent portability. However, a big problem that 3G faces at this point is a very high cost of rollout which has significantly slowed its growth in Japan and Europe and will most certainly slow its rollout in the U.S. The wireline industry should not look this slow rollout "gift horse" in the mouth. It should instead quicken the pace of its own rollout so that it might have a large entrenched base when greater competition arrives.

Second, there are again some clear portability and utility advantages to wireless networks within the home. The transfer rate of such networks continues to increase, while the cost and ease of implementation continues to improve. In this regard, it will be important for wireline broadband providers such as the cable industry to work to secure the distribution point by attaching to and enabling the home gateway. Home gateways are also the subject of amorphous descriptions, but typically can be defined as a central device in the home that:

As one of our panelists noted, one of the advantages for the cable industry is that it needs to deploy a device like an advanced set-top in order to offer a wide range of services even to one location, say the primary home entertainment center, within the home. This device can then be sophisticated enough to function as the gateway and distribute or route communications to other devices within the home through a variety of different means. It can utilize existing coaxial cable wiring within the home. It can interface with, and take advantage of, existing twisted pair infrastructure within the home using HomePNA standards developed by the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance. It can interface and take advantage of existing powerline infrastructure within the home using the HomePlug standard developed by the Home Plug Powerline Alliance. It can even interface with wireless systems utilizing Bluetooth, or another wireless standard such as 802.11b.

Many analysts believe that this will be an important marketplace going forward. Even with the current downturn in technology-based markets, home networking is still projected to be a $6 billion market by 2004. Most new PCs are now being bought by consumers who already own an existing PC, and consequently, one in three PC-owning households has expressed interest in developing a home network.

Captain Kirk used to tell us weekly that space was the "final" frontier. With all that has happened technologically, just in the last few years, I'm not sure there are really any final frontiers, just the next one to conquer.