10.09.2007 — Nestled in the middle of “Technology Week” in New York City was ShowStoppers, held at the newly opened New York Times Center.

Although many of the vendors were showing products and software geared toward the retail consumer, there were a few manufacturers familiar to the custom installation industry.

D-Link showed their newly announced Media Center Extender, the Pika 2.0-compliant DSM 750, which carries an MSRP of $349.00.

The 750’s most important feature for custom installations is that it is fanless and silent—finally, an extender suitable for bedroom use that does not sound like a vacuum cleaner running in a cabinet. The DSM-750 also supports the DivX and XVid video formats, which are very popular in European markets.

The DSM-750’s wireless capabilities include 802.11 a/b/g/n. It supports the a data channel at 5 GHz (Microsoft preferred for video) and b/g/n at 2.4 GHz.

It is also has a front mounted USB port that allows local viewing of photos, video and music content presented in a different user interface than the pure “MS Extender UI.” It’s a great way for guests staying in a clients’ guest room to view their own portable content while still giving them access to the main Vista Media Center PC programming and recordings.

The rear mounted USB jack can be used for Window USB Wireless connect, a process that allows an end user or installer to essentially clone the wireless network router settings from the main computer to a USB drive that, when inserted to the DSM-750, will copy all the long encryption keys, DNS and other information automatically.

This is a great feature that I find a surprising number of CE-based installers have often never heard about. These same installers seem to complain the most about the complexity of doing wireless device installations.

D-Link also had their new DGL-4500 gaming router on display. The DGL-4500 uses a newer version of their “Game Fuel” engine that not only performs real time analysis and optimization of packets, essentially giving priority to timing critical packets such as online game data and video, but can also perform this process on wireless data, a first for a consumer level networking product.

Four gigabit Ethernet ports are supported for the wired portion of a home network. The DGL-4500 also has an easy-to-read OLED display on its top that allows you to graphically see the key networking parameters of the router without having to hook up a laptop. This also allows you to determine the issue before you have to send a tech out to check on the problem.

D-Link had a working demo of their DIR-450 EVDO portable broadband router and Wireless access point on display. The DIR-450, available for Verizon and Sprint networks, is packaged as the DIR-451 for Cingular.

Basically, these products allow you to plug in your roaming computer broadband card and have multiple wired and wireless computers connected to the Internet and each other through it. When you go on the road, you just pull out the card and replace it in the unit when you return.

I think that this is a great piece for custom installation clients who have second homes/beach houses and only need email and light Internet access while on vacation. When they’re ready to leave, they just pull the card out and put it back in their laptop.

D-Link reps said they are seeing significant sales of both pieces to retirees who have RVs, who use the router while on the road. Clients with boats, construction trailers or a field office are all possible locations for this product. It would allow for Internet access while working onsite, and then the card goes home with the project manager in his laptop.

The latest trend in broadband carriers offering unlimited data packages will mean more and more consumers and builders will be looking for pieces like this. If only manufacturers would design a model utilizing mobile broadband cards that could be used to provide emergency backup Internet access when a client’s, cable, DSL, or Hughes DSS Internet is out due to weather.

By having a hybrid home router include an extra WAN port for automatic failover switching, this could happen. It would be slow, but better than a client having no access at all. D-Link says they can do this automatic failover on their current commercial router models and have begun to investigate the possibility of it for the consumer residential market.