Review of the Intel® AnyPoint™ Home Network
Last updated: 07/29/03

HOW IT WORKS.  The heart of the AnyPoint Home Network is the external AnyPoint network adapter.  It is a 8" high by 3 1/2" wide miniature tower.  All of the cables and power plug in at the back of the unit, shown here.  If we dissect the unit we will discover there is single printed circuit board inside.  On this board are four large chips.  The principle one is Intel's 21145 Phone line/Ethernet Controller.  Among the many features of the 21145 is the circuitry to implement both 1 Mhz home phone line networking or 10 Mhz Ethernet networking and to auto sense what kind of network it is on.  Its use in an AnyPoint Parallel Port system is restricted to the 1 Mhz speed by the parallel-port interface, if nothing else.   It implements the Home Alliance (HomePNA) effort to adopt a single, unified phone line networking standard and incorporates Tut Systems' Homerun technology.  Homerun allows networking over existing residential voice-grade telephone wiring without interfering with the simultaneous use of a telephone, FAX machine, or high-speed  Universal Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line (UADSL) services on the same line.  The phone line network is essentially a variation of the Ethernet.  It uses Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) to operate the Home Network in a 5.5 Mhz to 9.5 Mhz frequency band and maintain separation from Plain Old Telephone Services (POTS) and UADSL, or dial-up MODEM on the same line.

< Previous | Contents | Top | Next - Hardware Installation >