Chapter 1
Mi Casa, Cool Casa

In This Chapter

• Looking at a day in the life of your wired home
• Understanding what goes into a wired home
• Quantifying the benefits of a home network

If you stop the average person on the street and start talking about home networks, he or she would probably make references to ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX, or mention the Home Shopping Network or some other cable network show. Network, until recently, has meant little else to most people.

But times, they are a changin'. The invasion of telecommunications into all aspects of life is creating a different meaning of the word network. Most people have had some contact with a network through their work environment computer local area networks (LANs) in the office, control networks in factories, telephone networks in many mid-sized or larger businesses.

You can think of networks simply as things that help you do your work. As you concentrate on printing a document, calling up a database, or checking out the price of a product online, the network is invisible. (That is, invisible until its broken, or you don't have one at all.)

The network concept has begun to move from the workplace to the home, and smart homes builders and remodelers (and forward-looking owners of otherwise perfect existing homes) are starting to think in terms of wiring (or wirelessing) their homes both to make use of a network today and to future-proof against upcoming requirements.

Before you go any farther, do this little exercise (don't worry, we won't grade you): Write down all the things in your house that you think you may want to network together. Be as creative as you can. Think about your lifestyle and the way your house is set up. When you finish, put the list aside and read on in this chapter. Toward the end, we'll share our list with you.

Living in Your Smart Home

Your smart home can seep into all aspects of your life. It helps you do those day-to-day tasks that can take up so much time -- little things like opening the draperies, turning up the lights, and flipping on the Weather Channel to see whether the kids have a snow day. How far you go with your smart home depends on your lifestyle, your budget, and your personal tastes. The following sections spend a virtual day in a fictitious smart home. Here's the scenario: You, the reader, are part of a family of six, plus the requisite pet (we prefer dogs). You and your spouse both work, and the kids range in age from 8-17.

 

Starting your day

Anyone with kids knows the importance of keeping on a schedule. Your home network helps you do just that, in style.

At first light, you wake to your home-controlled alarm a stream of pleasant classical music coming over your home audio network into your bedroom. After a preset length of time, the music fades out and the TV kicks on to your favorite local station, where you can get the weather and traffic reports, and information about any school closings or delays. Down the hall, the kids also awaken to the music of their choice.

In the kitchen, the coffeemaker starts brewing your morning caffeine requirements. Select shades and drapes throughout the house open to let the day's light stream in.

It's winter, so the towel warmers and radiant heat in the bathrooms' floors are turned on. The automatic pet door out back opens and lets the dog out for his morning constitutional.

By this time, you're already in the kitchen making school lunches. Being the nice person that you are, you take a cup of coffee to your spouse who is listening to National Public Radio in the shower.

As you finish laying out the breakfast for the kids, a glance at the upstairs monitors shows that two of the four kids are still in bed. Your eldest son is videoconferencing with his girlfriend on his computer. You punch the intercom and tell them all to get a move on.

As the children cycle in and out the bathroom, the home control system times their showers to make sure that no one hogs the bathroom. The shower's water temperature is just to their liking, but that's hardly a surprise -- it's the same setting they use each day this time of year.

As you sit down to breakfast, your spouse comes running through, late for the office. A printout of major headlines and personal stock standings sits in the printer waiting, having been created and downloaded from the Internet overnight.

Your spouse works down the street (we did tell you that you work at home, didn't we?), and your smart home knows you both like a warm car when you get into a 15-degree garage, so the home controller starts the car 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time. Before your spouse climbs inside the toasty car, the home control system gives a verbal reminder to put the bottles and cans next to the curb because today is recycling day.

As your spouse leaves the garage, your home control system talks to your phone system and redirects all of your spouse's home business line calls to the car phone. Once at work, a simple push of a speed dial button on the office phone dials in and redirects the calls again to your spouse's office.

Back at home, you confirm that the kids caught the bus by using the video monitor in the kitchen, and then you get ready for work. You ask the home controller to put the house in your personal mode in terms of temperature, music, lighting, drape settings, and anything else you may have set.

 

Getting down to work

You get a second cup of coffee and decide to work for a little while in the sunroom. You tell the home controller where you are, and the controller transfers all your business calls to the extension near the table. Your laptop is wirelessly connected to your server and to the Internet. You check your e-mail and voice mail and make a few conference calls on the home multiline telephone system. While you are on one phone call, you access the online ordering page for that ultra-expensive, posh, take-out shop down the street. Twenty minutes later, the delivery person arrives at the front door; you take your wireless two-line phone conference call and all to the door where you pay off the delivery person and retreat back to the sunroom for lunch.

For a mid-afternoon break, you head for the exercise room to work off some of that lunch. When you enter, you announce yourself to your voice-activated home automation system, and it automatically sets the music and other environmental settings to your previously-defined preferences. You sit down at your rowing machine, which is front-ended with a large monitor that shows real-life settings of popular rowing locales.

Halfway through your workout session, a delivery person shows up at your door. An announcement that someone is at the door interrupts the music, and the nearest video display shows a picture of who it is. You don't want to stop mid-workout, so you reply that you are busy and ask him to leave the package inside the door. You prompt for the control system to unlock the front door, and watch as the front door unlocks itself and the delivery person places the packages in the foyer. He leaves, and you start rowing again along Boston's Charles River.

It's your turn for a temperature-controlled shower, where you listen to CNN from the TV set, via moisture-resistant speakers that are mounted in the bath.

Squeaky clean, you go back to work. At 3:00, you have your first videoconference of the day from your office downstairs. While in the basement, you call up your home control system and start the roast cooking in the oven.

The kids drift home in the afternoon and spread out across the house. As you access your corporation's data network, your kids take advantage of the computers at the same time. The youngest kids -- twins -- play multiplayer games on the home high-speed Internet connection. Your eldest daughter logs onto the school's educational extranet to do research for the midterm paper she has due next week. And your son, when home from football practice, logs onto his school's extranet to collaboratively work with three others on a joint presentation for the next day.

The home controller's voice enunciator reminds you that the roast should be done by now, and you head upstairs.

 

Internet, intranet, extranet . . . it's all the same stuff By now, you probably know a good deal about the Internet, but you'll probably hear more and more about intranets and extranets in the future. For the most part, all of these systems ride over the same Internet that you hear about all the time. If you work at home, you may be accessing the Internet, an intranet, and an extranet for various activities. An intranet is merely a secured sublayer of the Internet. Many corporations want to use the Internet for sending information to other locations -- out to their remote offices, say -- but want to make sure that the communications are secure and private. So they buy intranet gear to create what are called virtual private networks, giving the corporations their own internet within the Internet . . . an intranet. An extranet is similar, except it involves parties outside of the corporation as well -- say its trading partners. For instance, a large automobile manufacturer may have an extranet that links its suppliers with its various plants and other key locations. Because the link is with firms outside the corporation, it's called an extranet.

 

Dinner time

Meanwhile, at work, your spouse glances at the clock and remembers in a panic that the family needs groceries. A quick dial into the home LAN yields the grocery list that is on the computerized message board in the kitchen. On the way home, a phone call into the home controller redirects calls back to the car phone in case someone tries to call.

The magnetic driveway sensor tells the home control system to announce your spouse's arrival. As your spouse leaves the garage, the home controller again redirects all calls to the home office, completing the day's cycle. As your spouse brings the groceries into the kitchen, you receive a kiss (sorry, not automated).

Ready to eat, you ask the home controller to set dinner mode in the dining room. A microphone in the light switch hears the command and interfaces with the lights in the room, dimming them, and with the fireplace, turning on the gas-driven fireplace. The home control system selects a family-oriented CD from the CD tower and plays it over the in-wall speakers in the dining room.

After dinner, you start cleaning up as your kids race to their rooms to finish their homework. Later, the kids watch a TV special in the living room, while you take in an old Spencer Tracy movie in your bedroom. In the meantime, your spouse has a late videoconference with Japan in the home office downstairs. Occasionally, you access the picture-in-picture (PIP) capability on your TV set to check around the house, making sure that no one is getting into any trouble. After the movie, you give a simple command to the home controller and the lights go down, the temperature in select zones goes down, shades and draperies close, nightlights come on, and the intercom goes into monitor mode for the youngest kids, in case they're sick during the night. (The sound from those monitors only plays in the master bedroom area.)

 

Peace at last!

With the kids asleep for the night, you decide to take a nice relaxing bath. You instruct your home control system to prepare the bathroom -- dim the lights, open the skylight, run the bath at your favorite temperature, turn off the telephone extensions nearby (route them to voice mail instead), and play your favorite album on the bathroom speakers.

While lounging in bed watching the wide screen TV, your spouse tells the home entertainment system to search the shows it has been archiving every day and play the last episode of Star Trek Voyager.

Your house is in off-hours mode. The dog is inside, and the doggy door is secure. All phones have muted ringing volumes; some don't ring at all. All drapes are closed. The temperature is lower to save energy when your family is tucked in tight under the covers. All security systems are now alert, looking for movement outside the house.

After your bath, you climb in bed and read for a while. You finish your electronic book and decide you want to read the sequel right away. You surf the Web from your TV set, find the book, buy it, download it to the home LAN, and thus to your electronic book via a wireless connection.

Your dishwasher kicks on at midnight when the rates are low (you loaded it at dinnertime and turned it on, but the home controller actually activates it when rates drop). All night long, your home controller and its various sensors keep an eye on everything for you. You sleep peacefully.

The Home-Network Revolution

What's brought about this progression of intelligent home networks into everyday life? One word -- computers. Computers, computers and more computers. (Oh, we left out the most important one -- computers.)

And when we say computers, we don't just mean the PC that's sitting on a desk in a spare bedroom in 40 percent of American homes (although that's an important part of it). We also mean those little blobs of silicon that reside in just about everything in the house -- think about phones or televisions or refrigerators, even the car in the garage. Many of these items are already loaded with computer chips, and they get smarter by the minute.

Now, at this juncture, most of these systems use their computing power in isolated and unique ways -- islands of computing power plugged into the power outlets of your home. Many of them have no way of talking to each other or sharing the information that these computer chips gather and control.

The network revolution -- the home-network -- revolution is taking place as these things begin to talk to each other. Imagine, for example, a refrigerator that could talk to your electrical utility and go into its power-hungry defrost mode at exactly the same time that electricity rates are at their lowest. Or how about having all your clocks reset themselves automatically when the power comes back on after an outage, because they are set to network time.

Well, home networks aren't currently as advanced as the Jetsons' home, but they will be soon. And you're missing the boat if you build a new home, or remodel your existing one, and don't take this kind of future into account.

Predicting the future is difficult -- okay, its impossible -- but our culture is definitely moving to a place where a smart home is the norm. So although you can't know today exactly what will be connected to what (and how) tomorrow, you can design a wiring system for your home that will enable you to do the most you can today and be ready for tomorrow's needs.

Home wiring history Traditionally, homes have been wired for two things only -- power and telephones. Add in a couple of haphazardly run cable TV outlets and some doorbells, and you have the whole sum of home wiring for most homes. Some people have an alarm system put in, with its own unique set of wires, and maybe an intercom system, again with its own set of wires. Put it all together, and you have an expensive bunch of wires running throughout your house, each group of them doing their own thing, none of them talking to each other or, for the most part, being good for anything else. Even more important than the quantity of wires in most homes is the quality. Talk to a home-automation expert, or to a telephone-company engineer who's working on bringing high-speed data services to residences, and you'll find that one of their biggest concerns, if not the biggest, is the quality of the wires inside the walls of most homes. And this problem doesn't just apply to homes that were wired 50 years ago -- many brand-new homes are being built with wiring systems that are just plain inadequate for the requirements of today's wired citizens. The low-voltage wires (telephone and cable TV wires, for example) don't have adequate capacity for high-speed data use, or for multiple lines. They don't go to enough places in the house, and they have no flexibility of configuration. In other words, you're stuck with what you have, and if your needs change -- and they will! -- you'll most likely have to go through and rewire to accommodate them. Even the electrical power cables in most homes may be inadequate (and not just because you don't have enough outlets where you need them). In fact, many of the leading home-automation and control systems use your power cables to do things like turn on lights and start your coffeemaker, but only if your power system is adequately isolated from interference and line noise. Unfortunately, in many homes, they are not. Luckily, overcoming these difficulties isn't hard -- or even that expensive. All you need is a little knowledge and a good plan!

What's in a Smart Home?

A smart home works because of the advance planning you do. A smart home is a harmonious home, a conglomeration of devices and capabilities working according to the Zen of Home Networking.

At the beginning of this chapter, we suggest that you make a list of all the things you think you may want to network. Table 1-1 shows our list. Notice that practically anything in your home can be, and ultimately will be, networked. That's the whole point of whole-house networking.

Table 1-1 Stuff You Can Network!

Household Items	Audio/Video	Security	Phones	Computers
Drapes/shades	Receivers	Baby monitors	Corded phones	PCs
Gates	Amplifiers	Video cameras	Cordless phones	Macs
Garage doors	Speakers	Surveillance monitors	900Mhz phones	Laptops
Door locks	VCRs	Motion detectors	2.4GHz phones	Modems
Doorbells	CD players	Smoke detectors	Fax machines	Scanners
Lights	DVD players	Occupancy sensors	Answering machines	Printers
Dishwashers	Laserdisc players	Pressure sensors	Screen phones	PDAs
Refrigerators	TVs	Infrared sensors	Video phones
Heaters	WebTV devices	Intercoms
Alarm clocks	DBS dishes	Voice enunciators
Washers	Radios
Dryers	Remote controls
Microwaves	Cable TV devices
Coffeemakers	TV videoconferencing devices
Hot water systems
Air conditioners
Central vacuum systems
Water controls (shower, sink, and so on)
Pool covers
Fireplaces
Toys
Lawnmowers
Cars/vehicles
Pianos
Weather stations
Furniture

Note: Include in the list any phone or electrical outlet in the house.

The key is getting information to and from each of these devices. That takes a network. As explained throughout this book, your home network is actually a collection of networks -- communications in and among the different devices travel over various network layers, such as your home telephone network, your computing network, your security network, your electrical communications network (yes, you can talk over your electrical lines, believe it or not), and so on. These collectively are what we call your home network, and you will mix, match, and jump among these network layers as you communicate throughout your household.

Why Network Your Home?

A network allows you to do a bevy of things. For instance, you can

• Access the Internet from anywhere in your house: A home network lets everyone share in the broadband wealth, so you can stop fighting over the one computer connected to a cable modem or other high-speed connection. What's more, by having a communications backbone in your house, you can let anything -- from your TV set to your car -- tap in and make use of that connectivity. After you install your home network, an increasing number of devices will use it to make your life easier.

• Remotely control your home: After your home network is connected to your other networks, like the Internet, you can suddenly do amazing things from almost any interconnected spot. The ability to control a device after it is hooked up to the network is limited only by the openness of the device itself. (As the number of home networks grows, you can expect more devices to be open to remote control as well.) Want to turn off the lights downstairs from the bedroom? Click your remote control, and out go the lights. Want to check the babysitter while at your neighbor's July 4th bash? Just log onto their machine and check up on things.

• Save time: Think about how much time you take every day to open the shades, turn on the morning news, let the dog out, and so on. Wouldn't you like to do all that (and more) with one command? By programming these chores into task profiles, you can.

• Save money on electronics: With a true home network, you have to buy fewer devices to outfit your home. Instead of having a VCR hooked to every TV set, for instance, you can centralize this functionality and distribute the signal around the house via remote control as you need it. The same is true of almost any network-connected device -- tape decks, DBS receivers, cable boxes, and so on.

• Save money on communications costs: By centralizing access to certain telecommunications services, you can cut your monthly service costs. For instance, with a home-network backbone, both you and your spouse can connect to the Internet on separate computers while sharing one line and one account. Whats more, you can now get a high bandwidth option -- like a cable modem, DSL link, or DirecPC-type satellite service -- to share with the whole family.

• Save money on your home expenses: A wired home can turn back those thermostats when you're cuddled under your blankets at night or away on vacation. It can turn lights off automatically, too. Over time, you may save a surprising amount in heating, cooling, and electricity expenses.

• Save money on the future: At different times in your life, you may find yourself changing the way you use certain rooms -- a guest room becomes a nursery or the garage becomes an office, for example. Changes like these can be expensive if you try to bring your network along for the ride. Rerunning wiring through walls can be expensive and sometimes impossible. Wireless options can be limiting in what they offer in terms of bandwidth and distance. Planning ahead by having an articulated home network strategy -- one that is future-proofed for all sorts of contingencies -- simply saves you money down the road.

• Be more flexible, and comfortable, with your technological assets: A home network frees you from being tied to one spot for one activity. For instance, when working late at night, we sometimes like to move the laptop to a comfy recliner instead of a damp basement office. However, without a distributed means to access the Internet (and therefore our centralized e-mail, calendars, and contact databases), we would have no choice but to stay in the office.

• Lose more fat: A smart home won't stop you from eating chocolate cake, but it will spice up that exercise room of yours. You can run Internet access, CNN, or exercise videos over your home network to help you keep pace and pass the time on that treadmill or bicycle. And, with your Internet access, you can access many of the neat new software programs that combine with new exercise equipment to provide you with passing scenery or live competitors as you row, row, row, your rowing machine!