What tech trend will be big in the year ahead? Home networking. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bootcamp, a report on computers and technology. There are a lot of new PCs in homes after the holidays and in many cases, they are the second or even third computers in the household. What should you do? Link them together! You don't have to run wires through your walls anymore to do it. The coolest technology around is Apple's Airport. It lets new iMacs or iMacs share Internet connections wirelessly. For Windows PCs, home phoneline networking is the simple answer. 3com and others are out with new 10 megabit cards that link PCs just by plugging them into your existing phone jacks. 3com's Brent Lang...

"People have dreamed ever since the George Jetsons about networking their home and there's been a fair amount of hype about it over the years. But 1999 really changed a lot of dimensions about why home networking might become important. And the biggest thing as you might expect is the Internet. And a home network primarily is a way of creating shared Internet access so that multiple family members can get onto the Internet simultaneously."

It's great for multi-players games and printer sharing too... and installation is easy...

"We have partnered with Microsoft to create HomeClick software, which is a very, very easy to use graphical user interface that allows customers to walk through the installation process without necessarily having to be an expert."

Easier still... but considerably slower... are the USB and parallel port AnyPoint home phoneline networking kits from Intel.