Pervasive broadband

Matsushita (better known in the US as Panasonic) has created a chip which enables 170Mbps connections (about 70% faster than Ethernet, and 114 times faster than a T1) throughout your house using standard electric outlets.

TOKYO (AP) - The common electric socket will serve as your home's connection to broadband with a new chip developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. - doing away with all the Ethernet cables or the hassle of hooking up to a wireless network device.
Products are still being developed, but gadgets embedded with the chip from the Japanese manufacturer of Panasonic products can hook up to a broadband network by plugging into the common electrical outlet, company officials said Thursday.
That's because the Osaka-based company has come up with technology to use electric wiring in the home to relay not just electricity but also data.
The technology has been around for some time - including in the United States - but Matsushita's system is unique in that it delivers fast-speed broadband information at up to 170 megabits per second, which is faster than Ethernet.
... Matsushita official Tomiya Miyazaki said that even homes with optical fiber connections don't have broadband outlets in every room, and people are tired of setting up gadgets with their home wireless LAN device.
"Our goal is to have every gadget plugged in this way so that people don't have to even think about connecting it to broadband," he said.

The upside of this is obvious - no more running CAT5e wiring to each room of your house, and you avoid the headache of configuring wireless securely. The downside I see is that you have to put locks on any outdoor outlets (or even lightbulbs!) to keep intruders from having free run of your home network.

While a lot of consumers will appreciate "not having to even think about connecting it to broadband", this isn't a perfect solution. Sometimes thinking is a necessary and good thing. Case in point: downloading software on the internet. It used to be that users "didn't even have to think" about where a program came from and what it might do. Viruses, worms, trojans and spyware have changed that, and now an awful lot of people and companies are spending an awful lot of time thinking about what you allow on your computer.