Click here for contact details, other articles and personal details

Future home networks

Feb 1999

The convergence of computing, telecomms and consumer electronics will mean that most domestic electronics will be able to communicate with other appliances and with the network. Of course, high capacity storage technologies such as DVD mean that information can arrive in the home by other means than networks, but within the home, it is uneconomic to duplicate equipment in every room. The alternative is to network it, allowing information appliances in one room to process and transfer information to appliances elsewhere in the home.

Digital TV, cable and satellite TV, home video cameras, security networks, domestic appliances, home shopping tablets, electronic magazine tablets, video windows, electronic paintings and various other appliances will all need high capacity connections to each other and occasionally to the outside world. The home network of the future will have to support several high-resolution video appliances, analog and digital, with interactivity and easy routing and distribution of signals around the home, in order to avoid multiple receivers or decoders. Most householders will not want to buy several digital TV decoders or satellite receivers. Also, it would be useful to allow all the gadgets to be hidden under the stairs or in the attic, with a network making them accessible from anywhere in the home, preferably with a Star trek type voice interface. There will also be various portable and roaming devices that require cordless connection, and several others that are static but for which cordless working would be essential or desirable.

There are various ways of networking appliances in the home. One is to use the electricity mains cables, and this is effective for many applications. It should be capable of carrying data for basic internet access, electronic paintings, email and many other services, particularly for those that are relatively insensitive to momentary burst of noise. Two alternatives are infrared and ultrasound. At present the use of infrared in the home is just for remote controls for TV and video players, but infrared LANs are already available which could do much more. The key limitation is that IR is line of sight and can't go through ceilings or walls, so that every room needs at least one ceiling transceiver node. Rooms would still need to be cabled together somehow. Ultrasound is inherently relatively low in capacity so no use for the high data rates that will be needed for many future appliances. Mains transmission is fine for some data services such as, but has technical problems in carrying voice or video or other real time services due to noise on the cables when electrical appliances switch on or off. Two more alternatives are twisted copper pair and fibre optic cabling. These are both capable of providing adequate solutions and both can be made to carry the required data rates, but ultimately, both are still handicapped by the fact that they are cable. Many appliances ill exist in the home of the future and if we are to avoid piles of tangled spaghetti everywhere, a cordless solution is essential. On the other hand, if battery technology does not improve markedly, lightweight cabling may still be needed for power supply for most appliances and dual power/comms cabling could be an acceptable solution to this problem.

The obvious remaining contender medium for home networks is radio. With a future optical access network, passive picocell technology would allow the public network to extend into and throughout the home via radio. Radio provides for cordless links, and could provide adequate capacity for the full range of likely domestic appliances at the required quality of service for at least the short and medium term. Meanwhile, new chips will soon be incorporated into consumer electronics that will allow appliances to set up their own local networks, so that traffic will route itself around the house almost automatically, and certainly without too much expertise being required of the householder to configure the system. By linking to the external network, appliances could download new software as required from the manufacturer so that their facilities can be kept up to date. The radio networks set up in the home by these new chips would mean that transmission in the home would be virtually free.

It is likely that removing the need for cabling will give a huge boost to the consumer electronics industry. We can expect a flourish of new devices - personal screens and visors, shopping tablets and electronic magazines, electronic shopping lists and cookery books with real time recipes that control the microwave directly, fridge front message and email tablets, and video baby monitors. Worse still, when they all start talking to each other we will see the microwave ganging up with the smart to enforce the new diet recommended by the electronic magazine. We may be free from spaghetti wiring, but at what cost?