Ah, the pain of home networking. Nobody wants it. Everyone experiences it, either directly or because they have turned out to be the primary technical support contact for any number of friends. At the end of the day, almost everyone who has a home network has it simply because they want to share an Internet connection at home. But now every home has an IT Manager, and most people don’t want that job.
The bottom line is that home networking is hard. There are approximately 24 million U.S. households with a home network, with each average home networking household having almost 3 PCs in it, many with legacy Windows PCs still around. With wireless penetration experiencing runaway growth, many people are getting into this without realizing what they really are getting into.
Our mission here at Network Magic is to demystify this morass called home networking, and make it just work for everyone. After all, at the end of the day most people don’t want to be IT Managers.
To understand home networking dynamics, trends, and what people need, the marketing and product teams here at Network Magic have done and continue to do tons of research. We bring consumers in for focus groups, conduct nationwide research panels of home networkers, go wardriving, stand over people’s shoulders in their home to see how they experience their home network, conduct detailed hardware and software product usability testing, and a whole lot more. We interact daily with router manufacturers, network device OEMs, Internet Service Providers, software providers, and anyone in the home networking space.
In this blog I’ll bring you some of our first hand experiences interacting with consumers. A mix of war stories, use cases, market research, and what we think some of the key drivers will be to sorting out this thing called home networking. If it advances the ball even a little bit in the direction of giving the consumer a seamless networking experience that just works all the time then I’m a happy camper.
--Sherman Griffin
