Western Digital enters home networking fray

Western Digital Corp. (Nasdaq: WDC), a company known mostly for external hard drives, announced its entry into the wireless home-networking market with the development of a new family of broadband routers.

The move is not a completely surprising turn, given that Western Digital also has been playing in the adjacent market for connected-media hubs, but wireless home networking certainly is a crowded and mature market for a new arrival at this point.

The vendor announced its My Net family of HD dual-band 802.11n products, with one of the defining feature being a quality-of-service detection and prioritization feature. That feature, called FasTrack, immediately detects when bandwidth-hungry entertainment traffic is on the network and fast-forwards to wireless-connected devices in the home.  My Net also claims simple set-up procedures and a My Net Dashboard allows users to customize, monitor or change network settings.

The company's new My Net N900 Central router also leverage Western Digital's legacy of storage expertise by including an integrated 1 TB or 2 TB internal hard drive. Also included in the new product family is the My Net N750 router, the My Net N600 router, and My Net 8-Port Gigabit home entertainment switch.

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