The idea of a ‘smart home', in which every gadget is linked together into a home
network, is easy to mock. Internet washing machines, smart air-con and kitchens that
read out recipes in camp robot voices all sound a bit too much like what we would get if Margaret Fulton wrote science fi ction.
But the reality is that home entertainment gadgets are talking to each other right now. In the future, they'll get a whole lot more inclined to sing in tune. And the fact that setting up your home entertainment is now (generally) so easy that your gran can do it without phoning you in tears is the first twinkling of home network intelligence – gadgets recognising each other, working together, letting you put your feet up and enjoy.
Commute to your sofa
Essentially, networks fi rst appeared on the home front by following us home from the office. Once home Internet access became pervasive, the concept of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs, if you want to get chummy) was developed to make it easy for us to work from home. VPNs are slowly replacing closed networks such as LANs; the idea is that you use the Net or shared telecoms lines, plus heavy duty crypto security to ‘fence in' a network, rather than paying for expensive exclusive lines.
This secure connectivity is shaping the way we design our homes as well as the way businesses are designing office space. Advantage to your company: buying fewer pot plants, beige carpet, office space, menial workers, etc. Advantage to you: commuting shrinks to four or five staggered steps from your bedroom through to the home office or wherever you want to set up your notebook.
As well as creating a secure network ‘tunnel' for remote workers, VPN technology is also being used to beef up security for connections between home computers – handy if you live next to a criminally minded geek with Wi-Fi gear and an eye on your bandwidth or your bank balance.
Power networking
Before we get into wireless networks, which are really driving the explosive growth in home networks, it's worth knowing that there's still networking life in the old copper cable. Tipped to be the next big thing in some quarters is Power Networking, which is a way of sending data around your home through its existing power cables. However convenient, Wi-Fi is really overkill for home entertainment devices that need to be permanently plugged into power anyway. Power networking also gets around one of Wi-Fi's biggest problems – bandwidth. With speeds of over 100Mbps, power networking allows you to access all your content, including high-definition video, from wherever you want.
And when you get to the point of wanting to watch three different high-definition feeds simultaneously - not a problem. To send more than one or two HDTV streams, there is a similar technology called MoCA in the pipeline that will send even video through coaxial TV aerial sockets at over 200Mbps.
The current drawback, of course, is that it's still illegal to decrypt DVDs, and you can't send them around the house without decrypting them first (ie breaking the disc's coded copy protection).
