It`s a Wired, Wired World

Wired versus wireless? There's been a whole lot of talk about what works best at home, ...

... but the plain fact is cable, and particularly Cat 5 or 6 cable, wins hands down.

And the move to much faster broadband here and overseas has made that more obvious than ever.

No matter who wins the next election, the average Australian home in cities is likely to have access to at least 10 megabits per second by the end of the decade.

And while Alcatel-Lucent and Telstra predict it will be 2021 before most urban homes here get 1 gigabit per second, the new higher speeds mean our homes have to be ready asap to handle all that digital information.

What I've been calling the smart home in a smart world.

Cat 6 residential cabling-made of copper of course-is now able to carry 10 gigabits per second over 100 metres. A major advance that no-one would have predicted a decade ago and a sign that there is still a hell of a lot of life left in copper wire.

Of course the appeal of wireless is obvious. As the ads point out endlessly it?s cheaper and more flexible, but what they forget to say is that it's current upper technological limit is around 50 megabits per second.

On top of that there are still major issues with its reliability and security.

Does it sound like I'm trying to put wireless down? I'm not. The fact is that wired and wireless are not competing technologies, but what I like to call "cooperative" ones.

I've always said the modern Australian home will be a hybrid of both, with the cables giving the foundation and wireless helping with convenience and distribution.

An analogy could be that wireless is a scooter and wired is a car. Both serve the same purpose, but nobody in their right mind says that they seriously compete.

With home wiring (known as Smart WiringTM in Australia because we did all the hard work for you some years ago) you can distribute huge amounts of data for movies, videos, audio and photo files, and telephony.

So if you are still arguing about wired versus wireless then you're missing the point. Life - as discovered by everyone building a home - will happily include both technologies.

Now, how do I print this off, again.

All wired up!!!
John J Fennell