Home network

A home network or home area network (HAN) is a type of local area network with the purpose to facilitate communication among digital devices present inside or within the close vicinity of a home. Devices capable of participating in this network, for example, smart devices such as network printers and handheld mobile computers, often gain enhanced emergent capabilities through their ability to interact. These additional capabilities can be used to increase the quality of life inside the home in a variety of ways, such as automation of repetitious tasks, increased personal productivity, enhanced home security, and easier access to entertainment.

Origins

One of the primary drivers behind the establishment of this kind of network is the need to distribute residential Internet access to all internet capable devices in the home. Due to the effect of IPv4 address exhaustion, most Internet service providers provide only one WAN-facing IP address for each residential subscription. Therefore, most homes require a device capable of network address translation (NAT) that can route packets between the public address visible to the WAN and private addresses of individual devices that share that public address. This router defines the boundary at which the service provider's network stops and the home's network begins. While it is possible for home networks to exist without connectivity to the outside world via a router, such topologies would have limited utility considering the bulk of current home network usage comes from home devices communicating with the WAN rather than with other home devices.

@Home Network

@Home Network was a high-speed cable Internet service provider from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), Comcast, and Cox Communications, and William Randolph Hearst III, who was their first CEO, as a joint venture to produce high-speed cable Internet service through two-way television cable infrastructure.

At the company's peak it provided high speed Internet service for 4.1 million subscribers in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Benelux nations, operating four joint ventures, three of which were international.

In 1999, the company merged with Excite.

History

The Passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled cable companies to start to offer Internet telephony services to customers.

The company's first VP of Engineering and later Chief Technology Officer Milo Medin, the company got its start from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In December 1998, Excite was in merger negotiations with Yahoo! inc in an agreement to purchase the Excite portal for a price between $5.5 billion and $6 billion. On December 19, at Kleiner Perkins prompting, @Home Network's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Thomas Jermoluk met with Excite's Chairman and CEO George Bell, according to documents filed with the SEC, and a deal was hashed out for the purchase of Excite and its debt.