IN ADDITION TO SHARED INTERNET ACCESS FOR PCS, THE HOME NETWORK WILL CONNECT TO EVERY CONSU.pdfVIP

CONNECTING THE HOME WITH A PHONE LINE NETWORK CHIP SET IN ADDITION TO SHARED INTERNET ACCESS FOR PCS, THE HOME NETWORK WILL CONNECT TO EVERY CONSUMER ELECTRONIC DEVICE. TO MAKE THIS POSSIBLE, WE MUST CONSIDER ROBUST SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS, HOME PHONE LINE STANDARDS, COSTS, AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SUPPORTING ILINE10 CHIP SET. We live in an age of ever-accelerating Local Loop (FWLL), terrestrial television technological change. The signal event at the broadcast, and satellite broadcast—are being end of the second millennium was almost cer- developed and will increase the flood of digi- tainly the explosion of the Internet. In 1995 tal information reaching the home. It is gen- there were 20 million Internet users; by 1998 erally assumed that our 50-year-old voice there were 160 million. We could have 500 telephony infrastructure will be replaced with million users worldwide by 2003, with over an integrated broadband digital network car- 14 countries having more than 40% of their rying voice, audio, video, and data. population online. Those 14 countries repre- What is less well appreciated is that the elec- sent more than half of the world’s GDP (gross tronic dendrites of this network will extend domestic product). beyond the personal computer to every elec-