Are We Ready for a Wireless Home?

Sep 15, 2001 12:00 PM, By Nikki Swartz, Assistant Data Editor

Orange’s concept home may be a first step, but homes probably won’t go wireless anytime soon.

You wake up late, rush through your morning chores, jump in your car and get halfway to work when you realize you’ve left the iron on. Today, you’d have to drive all the way back home to turn it off. But what if you could just call your house with your WAP phone and turn the iron off?

Someday, carriers may offer such services to make subscribers’ lives easier.

Last February, Orange introduced its vision (www.orange.co.uk) for the wireless future with “Orange at home,” a cutting-edge concept for an intelligent, wireless home.

It’s also a vision for the future role of wireless carriers and networks.

According to Hans Snook, Orange founder, adviser & former CEO, in the future, 90% of all mainstream communications will be carried over what currently are called “mobile” networks. By 2008, he has said, only 10% of today’s mainstream communications will be carried over fixed lines.

“Forget about being mere service providers, our future is as a communications-based life-services company,” he said at the 2001 GSM World Congress.

With the advent of home broadband access through satellite, cable and DSL, together with new wireless technologies within the home such as Bluetooth, wireless LAN and home-RF, the market opportunities are there. Many companies, including consumer-electronics giants, PC manufacturers and telecom companies, already are developing home-automation products.

A 2000 report on connected-home services by Cahners In-Stat Group (www.instat.com) estimates that, compared to 1999, the U.S. home- networking market will multiply 27 times by 2004. Despite such optimism, your home sweet home won’t go totally wireless anytime soon.

Orange’s Vision
The Orange at-home research center is a detached house in Hertfordshire, England, that cost more than $2.9 million. It features advanced services, which can be controlled using wireless technology such as Bluetooth, 802.11, WAP and voice recognition. In this house, an Orange phone is the remote control for everything: lighting, heating, security, audio-visual systems, curtains, baths and home appliances. Controls use WAP, SMS, PDAs, wall panels and Web-enabled PC and voice commands.

The Orange-led project, in partnership with the universities of Surrey and Portsmouth, opened in December 2000 but is closed to the public. It will be used to establish how consumers interact with advanced products and services, as well as how they eventually may be deployed and marketed.

“Orange at home will ensure that we fully understand the services that next-generation wireless technologies will provide,” said Richard Brennan, Orange executive vice president. “By undertaking research now and understanding how consumers use interactive services in the home today, we intend to be one of the first companies in Europe to bring to market services that make our customers’ lives easier, simpler and better.”

Orange isn’t the only one considering this exciting concept.

“It’s definitely something that’s in the future,” said Tom Trinneer, AT&T Wireless vice president, (www.attws.com) multimedia strategy. “The real interesting question is, are we going to have products that will arrive in advance of consumer demand, or will consumer demand and need actually drive the product?”

Trinneer predicted it could take 10 years before tasks such as scheduling doctor appointments or ordering take-out food will be made easier by a wireless device.

“When you have the meshing of connectivity, both wired and wireless, and a bunch of smart stuff in the network and in your device — it’s not an either-or — then you have a platform for these services to emerge. Which ones really get traction with consumers at some point is a guess,” he said.

For the Orange-at-home initiative, the carrier worked with more than 80 suppliers for systems and appliances, which Orange integrated into its wirefree home. The house also contains custom products and services for virtual work control.

Soon, insiders say, wireless hubs and modems will be built into most computing and home-entertainment devices. Internet appliances, or stand-alone boxes with basic computing features, will use high-speed networks installed throughout the home to stream audio and video programs. PCs connected to wireless-data networks, Bluetooth and satellite, will act as home servers. MP3 players in cars, homes and offices will be programmable via wireless devices and connect via Bluetooth, home networks or wireless-data networks to store and play back digital music files. Bluetooth will enable wireless networking for short-range communications and could control the heating system upon entering a room.

“You could have an in-home repeater of some sort ... that connects to a wide-area network,” Trinneer said. “That wide-area network could certainly be wired ... to your house, copper twisted-pair or cable. It could be a fixed-mobile solution. It could also be wide-area wireless like ours. The technology doesn’t really restrict you.”

Many companies are looking at ways to add wireless interfaces to their products, but the value chain remains unclear.

“Is the appliance company going to sell you a wireless service? Or will the wireless carrier sell you a service that’s going to work with an appliance?” Trinneer asked.

Wirelessly enabling homes could be a carrier specialty, he said, but partnerships with consumer electronics companies, utilities and other players will be integral.

Home, Sweet Wireless Home
Home automation has been attempted before. Now the technology is available and affordable. Several electronics manufacturers, including Sony and Philips (www.philips.com), are working to create and support standards.

“It’s got to be one or two standards max, and it’s got to be widely implemented,” said Rob Hyatt, Cingular (www.cingular.com) executive director, data services marketing.

Software and standardized home-management interfaces will be difficult to perfect. Also, carriers must key in on consumer needs to make wireless homes practical.

“We don’t know what people that far out (10-20 years) are really going to want, although there is some general interest in this space when you talk to people,” Trinneer said.

Hyatt said the technology must provide some unique value to consumers.

“The challenge would be having one device that would do all those things (remotely controlling the heating, lights and TV),” he said. “But I’m not sure there’s even a universal remote for all the electronic devices I have, so we haven’t really even solved it yet in the consumer-electronics space.”

Trinneer said even though future wireless devices probably will be able to store every bit of data you’ll need, carriers must balance what is possible with consumers’ needs.

“It will be more stuff that’s in the network, but many, many megabytes, if not gigabytes, may be in these small devices that you have with you, and that’s enough to keep financial records, medical records and preferences,” he said. “That needs to be transferred into wireless interfaces in the home, as long as it’s really convenient, really secure and doesn’t require a homeowner to have an IT staff.”

The real challenge will be customer education, Hyatt said.

“How many people know how to program their VCR?” he said. “Look how popular the Macintosh interface is. It’s simplicity of the actual execution that will make it work or not work.”

The home-automation stars already have begun to align. Hyatt said the market for wireless LANs in homes is starting to take off; computer manufacturers have begun bundling home applications; and PDA cards soon will allow interfacing to a GPRS network when you’re outside the home and an 802.11b wireless LAN inside.

“The other technology components related to devices and chipsets, IP technology, the evolution of the Internet and XML is crucial, but it seems like all the right stuff is happening there,” Trinneer said. “Security and privacy — those are very difficult topics right now.”

Things are coming together so well it’s rumored that a major U.S. carrier, perhaps Nextel (www.nextel.com), soon will release a Java application commercially that can control a home-security system wirelessly. Last year, a similar application won first prize at a developers’ conference competition sponsored by the carrier.

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Home’s Where the Wireless LAN Is
If you take Tom Trinneer’s word for it, wireless networks won’t have to change and/or adapt much to manage intelligent homes in the future.

“If you want to turn on or off your alarm system, query a particular zone to see if it was your dog or an intruder, turn the oven on to a particular temperature on your way home, or start the digital recorder to record “The West Wing,” the bandwidth requirement for that is tiny,” said the AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com) vice president of multimedia strategy. “On the other end of the spectrum, if you’ve got the new Sony (www.sony.com) Bluetooth-enabled handycam, that’s going to move a lot of data encoded in MPEG2, and that’s not a compressed format.”

In-home, however, you can use Bluetooth, HyperLAN 2 or 802.11 without devouring the WAN’s capacity. You then would bridge or route that information as it needs to get to the WAN through twisted-pair or even an EDGE or UMTS interface hooked up to the macro network.

With many in-building systems, consumers can have their own “private island of capacity” without worrying about WAN house obstacles such as metal framing and energy-efficient windows.

“You can avoid a lot of that and actually deliver a better solution to customers by giving them some sort of an integrated device that connects to the wide-area network and provides their own island of local area network,” Trinneer said. “The things that need to be built into the network are user profiles, security and privacy data and how to integrate location information when you’re at home versus on the WAN. Those are all skills that we either have and/or are building today.”

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The House That Orange Built
To enter the Orange home, you simply press a button on a “wirefree” key ring to unlock or lock the door, which also can be opened via text messaging and WAP so you’re never locked out.

When you walk into Orange’s concept home, the first thing you may notice is the small screen on the wall of the hallway that provides security information for the entire house, as well as smoke/fire detection, lighting and heating. In any room in the house, you can set or change the temperature by a simple voice command to “Wildfire,” which is your personal assistant in Orange’s home of the future. Wildfire may respond, “I turned the heat up to 70 degrees.” (In the future, Orange said you’ll be able to choose whether Wildfire has a Pierce Brosnan, Marilyn Monroe or even Britney Spears voice.)

You also can control security, lights and AC/heat using an Orange WAP phone, through the Web, through wall controls, a PDA or a wireless phone with text messaging. In the future, AC/heat units may even be able to self-program themselves in response to data they receive wirelessly from any room. If you’re out late, you can use your WAP phone or send an SMS to your home’s server to tell it to turn the lights on before you arrive.

The house features an advanced, integrated TV, video, DVD, radio and CD system. Video and sound is routed through the house from one central location and controlled via wireless devices. You can set the TV to your preferences simply by clicking on a channel you like. Your choices are stored on one central media server that talks to all of the TVs in the house. Orange said you’ll be able to pay for the programs you want to watch and even download movies to the central server.

You won’t need a CD player or CDs either. You can just ask the Wildfire system to play your favorite CD, or Madonna’s new single, in the living room. The system will either play your CD from its storage system, or download something new. Your music collection will be stored in a “virtual locker” held with Orange. So wherever you are, you can access your music, pay to play new music or listen to your favorite radio station.

You’ll also be able to play networked games with anyone anywhere in the house. These could be games you’ve purchased, rented or downloaded as digital files from the Web.

The home portal features a wireless LAN and provides real-time information on news, health, travel and traffic. This can be set to your preferences and accessed through a PC, TV, the Web or outside the house through a WAP phone.

Your appliances will be monitored remotely. If any one breaks down, an engineer will know exactly what needs replacing, before visiting the house, via an SMS message from the appliance.

In the future, the refrigerator may be connected via a wired network, a home network and Bluetooth. Hardware can provide Web access via a screen in the door. Software programs can keep track of the fridge’s service records, automatically contact a repairperson when necessary and generate a shopping list when you’re low on milk.

Orange is working with partners to develop a food-management and grocery-ordering service. If you’re at work or in your car, you can call your virtual assistant and ask it to add tomatoes to your shopping list. When you’re ready, you can ask your assistant to send the order via a text message. An online grocer will confirm what time the groceries will arrive so you can set your delivery box to open. When the groceries are delivered, a message is sent to your phone to tell you, and the box locks itself until you get home. Through the central control system, the coffee maker in this kitchen can be turned on or off remotely. You can even start the coffee with your WAP phone.

There are no alarm clocks. All alarms are stored and displayed in a central system that connects to the heating, hot water, bath, music and coffee machine. From your bed, you can ask your personal assistant to set the alarm, fill the bath, turn on the sound system, activate the security system or start brewing coffee in the kitchen. The bathroom door automatically locks when you close it. Sensors tell the system that someone is in the room and automatically unlocks the door if you leave. You can fill the bathtub with a button, WAP, text messaging, the Web or your voice. As you relax, you can listen to your favorite tunes through a radio feed from the central media server.

In the home gym, an exercise bike monitors your heart rate, gathers your individual health information and sends it back into the central system. In the future, all your health information could be sent a doctor or consultant so they can monitor your condition.