A Smarter Home Network - Industry Trend or Event

Broadband and the Internet could spark a home networking revolution, but who will lead the way?

We've had the dream of an intelligent house dangled before us for a very long time. After all, what has Bill Gates been building for himself all these years if not the nonpareil of smart homes? If recording a TV show seems a fatuous use of future-tech, visionaries see it as much more than that. In those dreams, everything that can be--entertainment centers, PCs, lights, heating and cooling, even our security systems--will be connected and accessible both in the house and away from home by remote control, the Internet, or a WAiP-enabled cell phone. And our homes will be nodes on a very WAN run on fat, broadband pipelines around the world.

"The Americans call it the Jetson home but that sort of vision is still a dream really," laughs David Mercer, an analyst at Strategy Analytics.

Is it a vision which time's finally come? "Two things will drive home networking. One is pervasive Internet, which is Internet on multiple devices, and the other is broadband," Mercer said. "With a combination of those, you'll see rapid growth in home networking." Mercer's two factors, pervasive Internet and broadband connections, are beginning to penetrate American homes now.

Whether the smart home of the near future has a central-access point and what that device will be are still up in the air. Companies like West Yorkshire, England-based Pace Micro Technology think the focus of our home networks will be found in digital TV set-top boxes (STBs). Increasingly, STBs are being referred to as "gateways;" Pace Micro believes they will act as the connection point to the broadband line linking a house's appliance network to external networks.

The utopian ideal of a single gateway around which the family and home network revolves is dismissed by others. "Multiple gateways seem likely," said Rolf Johansson, strategic marketing manager, home communications, at Ericsson Mobile Communications. "They will compete in and service different areas."

This notion of just how everything will be connected together is an important issue with many potential home network solutions. Different connection schemes--multi- or uni-gateway solutions, competing connection technologies and standards--are backed by different companies and organizations. Several suitable technologies exist, each with its own pros and cons. Yet the general consensus is that wireless will rule within the home, simply due to consumer reluctance to connect wires between electronic equipment in the home, especially in different rooms.

The trouble with the intelligent home network solutions pitched so far is some of them have the potential to interfere with each other. Remember when remote-control devices first became popular and just about everyone had an anecdotal story of a neighbor's garage-door remote changing TV channels up and down the street? Hone family's network interferes with its neighbor's systems, home consumers will understandably become disillusioned with the whole business. For a market that is expected to reach $2.4 billion by 2005, according to Allied Business Intelligence Inc., Oyster Bay, N.Y., such incompatibility is not only confusing but unnecessary.

Like the best of late-night infomercials, the home networking market needs to prove to consumers that the smart home network is not only a good idea but necessary. Strategy Analytics' Mercer believes a golden opportunity exists for someone to become the friendly face of broadband and the home network.

"At the moment the technology is pretty complex and you're asking consumers to do rather a lot," Mercer said. "For it to become a mass market, it needs somebody to get hold of the whole concept of the broadband home and market its advantages, to take the whole thing away from the technology."

Mercer expects it will be one of the big network operators that takes up the challenge sometime in the next few years. "We'll see somebody trying to pull all of this together and present it as a great new thing that evervbodv needs to have."