If you run a home network, especially a wireless network, you may find the best deal for managing it comes from your phone company. (The picture is of a wired Netopia ADSL gateway on sale at PC Mall.)
As I have studied residential gateways, I have been surprised to learn that the ones you can get direct from your phone company are, in fact, much better values than anything you can get off-the-shelf.
The software behind the gateway, controlled by the phone company, actually provides the most value.
When I talked to Netopia recently the company was despairing of getting retail shelf space. Retailers want a broad line and a low price, I was told. At the time they were running a "Netopia Store," where you could comparison shop for some of the new products, but a recent visit to the site showed the store is no longer operating.
The problem with letting price and product depth define retail choices is that stores wind up offering poor quality. This is not much of a problem in the PC world, or even in computer electronics, where quality is not really much of an issue. In the world of 802.11 gateways, however, it is an issue.
And you can't tell the difference between two gateways just by looking at them, or even by reading the literature. You have to install them, and live with them a while.
I've had the Netopia gateway here for over a week, and it hasn't failed me yet. The computer has failed several times (mainly because of PC applications interfering with the operating system), and I even got a virus that forced me to re-install Windows so the gateway could operate on a remote machine. But the Netopia software itself caused no problems -- and it took just minutes to install. Even the wireless.
Now on to the second point. Netopia is offering carriers a version of its server software called NetOctopus for Broadband. This stuff will let phone company people diagnose troubles with your network remotely, fix it remotely, even update your service remotely.
Not only that, the software will let your phone company up-sell you important, valuable services. Services like parental control (Netopia is already offering this to Linksys customers), maybe Voice Over IP, VPN tunnels, even low-latency QoS for gaming. For starters.
I can't review this stuff, because I just have the gateway -- my ISP is not connected to Netopia in any way, and thus they don't have this great back-office software. But once a carrier makes a deal with a gateway company -- any gateway company -- customers will be getting this.
Will Netopia win those deals? I don't know. So far, the only such deal to be signed in North America was in Canada, and Siemens won it.
A home network that installs quick, is updated automatically, and lets you buy other valuable, important services? Only through the phone company.
So far.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
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