Do you want your fridge to send video emails? Will a washing machine with a Net connection help to refresh your tired whites? And should you care whether your stereo can send streaming audio signals to your holiday house.
Yes, say household technology companies, for whom ‘wired home' is the biggest buzz phrase since we all used ‘digital' to death. Yes, say techno-gurus Mr and Mrs Posh-Beckham, who invested £8000 in a Net-connected fridge. Yes, say Orange and Nokia, who both recently trialled houses full of Net-connected tech-nology linked into a home network.
‘Wired home', then. Translation? Future homes where electronics, PCs and white goods are all linked into an intelligent home network. Like in sci-fi films where people come home and go, ‘Marmite on toast, my messages and a hot bath', and the house computer gets them all in while talking in an irritating voice.
The first of these appliances and networks are appearing right now. But are they really a taste of the future, or are Net-hooked appli-ances doomed to remain as tacky flim-flam for rich taste-bypass victims to adorn their palaces with?
These are early days, and wired appli-ances like LG's Internet Fridge at around $15,000 are seen as showcase products, not realistic consumer items. The technology companies are testing the water. LG is not worrying unduly whether it'll sell thousands of Internet Fridges. The Fridge is meant for people to peer at in Harvey Norman or for newspapers to coo over and say ‘fancy that'.
But some of the uses they've found for their PC-on-a-fridge technology really are rather clever. For instance, the Fridge can notify a service centre if it's malfunctioning. It can count the days till your bacon goes critical. And it can work as a message board for family members, using a built-in webcam for video messaging – just like notes stuck to the fridge door, but 24,000 times more expensive.
The coolest thing, though, is how you can also control LG's other networked appliances (microwave, air con, washing machine) from either the Fridge or a remote website. The inbuilt modem allows users to adjust any of the networked appliances from LG's website. You can start the washer a couple of hours before you set off home, or click the air con to ‘Siberian' if the weather turns hot.
But the Fridge and its little network are very much a work in progress. You need to hammer in sell-by dates if you want the Fridge to keep an eye on the foods within. And it isn't clever enough to send communications across the Web other than "I'm broken" – it can't order more groceries when the milk runs dry.
But the most glaring flaw is that the net-work will only work with LG appliances. And that applies to most efforts at creating ‘wired homes' so far. Samsung, Sharp and many other electro-giants are working on Net appli-ances, but goods from different manufacturers are about as likely to talk to each other as the tribes of Man after the fall of the Tower of Babel.
Some use modems, some talk wirelessly, some chat through your house's power grid by minor adjustments in their power consumption (‘con-veyor-wave' communications), some even use wires. And they all talk different languages.
It's a nice idea for LG or Samsung that we'll equip our houses top-to-toe with their goods, but it won't happen. People don't like being coerced into brand loyalty. Companies have to earn it. Someone needs to devise a standard way to get your microwave chatting civilly with your fridge and your stereo, or the wired-up household is going to remain a pipe dream.
Of course, your PC could be the answer. If you can link each individual gadget up to your PC, you've got a nerve centre to control everything from, and it's ready-hooked to the Net. Since home PC networks are increasingly common, this seems to make sense. And you can always upgrade your software to deal with a super-intelligent microwave or an air con with attitude.
But you needn't sit at your PC fiddling away with your network. In fact, you'll hardly notice that your PC is in charge. It'll handle all the network administration business quietly in the background, working like a home server, with information bubbling in and out to remote websites via your broadband hook-up.
It's all practical, workable stuff. The question is, how much do you want your network to do?
