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John Abel loves football. “I'm a Redskins fan, and if I'm traveling, I can't see them unless I go to a bar with DirecTV,” said Abel, senior vice president in charge of conventions and business opportunities for the United States Telecom Association. But, Abel recently devised a solution with the help of a product called LocationFree TV which runs off a base station connected to both his Wi-Fi and broadband networks. Now, when he's on the road, he can go back to his hotel and access his home network from his laptop and watch the Redskins game broadcast from a local TV channel back in Virginia.

There's only one problem: sometimes the video freezes because of lack of bandwidth. “That's why Verizon's FiOS network is interesting to me,” he said, “I'd like to have big pipes at home — I want the 30 Mb/s.”

Even though Abel already pays for a T-1 line, he signed up for the Verizon FiOS service, which will activate the fiber Verizon already installed.

LocationFree TV is the tip of the technological iceberg in Abel's Virginia home. He's got more than 20 TV sets along with nine desktop computers, each with large amounts of storage space. In the last few months, Abel has also added Microsoft media servers, where he stores music, video, and books on CD. He distributes his content through his home via a 1 Gb/s Ethernet network running on Cat 5 cable and three Wi-Fi networks.

John Abel may live at the bleeding edge, but his home is a harbinger of things to come. With 18 million home broadband connections, 8 million home wireless networks, new home networking technologies, cheap sensors and inexpensive storage devices, homes like Abel's will become more common in the near future. The areas where we'll likely see the greatest changes are in home entertainment, home networking, security systems, energy management and home phones.

By the end of the year, Verizon plans to reach 3 million homes with its fiber network. The company also will launch FiOS TV, which will offer HDTV and DVR functionality, video-on-demand, 3-D gaming and other interactive capabilities. Similarly, SBC's fiber network will pass 18 million homes by 2007, and the carrier is working with Microsoft to deliver IPTV services by the end of the year. BellSouth is also conducting IPTV technical trials and plans to expand its fiber to the curb (FTTP) network to pass more than 1 million homes.

It's about time.

“TV hasn't evolved much in the last 50 years or more,” said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing for Microsoft TV division. “We've finally started to see real innovation like video-on-demand and digital video recorders, but TV is still what I call an island of technology — it doesn't connect to anything else,” he said.

TVs outnumber PCs in the world, and Microsoft wants to figure out how to make the TV set a connected device inside and outside the home. Microsoft envisions the TV as a platform for accessing photos and music from networked home PCs.

Telcos hope that IPTV will help them compete against cable providers. IPTV dramatically changes the economic model for TV programming and offers an interactive experience. “Niche programming may be considered now that might not have been economically viable for a cable TV operator,” said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, a consulting firm that keeps track of technological developments in the home. With IPTV, for instance, it would be possible to devote an entire channel to Chinese cooking.

The interactive component also shows promise for delivering services targeted toward affinity groups.

“NASCAR found that they have a significant amount of people who watch the races and have a laptop going at the same time using the TrackPass service to follow the telemetry of their favorite drivers,” said Derek Kuhn, senior director of marketing and business development for Alcatel Strategic Solutions. “NASCAR fans track how fast the engine is going, how long before they need extra fuel, things that really appeal to that demographic.”

With interactive TV, fans could track those stats right through their TV sets.

Start-ups such as Akimbo and Brightcove are betting heavily that there will be a dramatic growth in video content over the Internet with the adoption of IPTV and these companies will offer services that let consumers access a wide range of video content.

“We believe that IP video as Akimbo does it lets anyone become a video provider, whether you're a large TV provider or whether you're a surf shop in Santa Monica with a couple hundred surfers,” said Akimbo CEO Josh Goldman, speaking on an audio conference call sponsored by Pike & Fischer earlier this year.

As John Abel can attest, it's one thing to get broadband services to the PC or TV, but consumers will need to figure out how to move those services around their homes with in-home networks. “Moving those services around in the home is a challenge; it's not trivial,” Kuhn said.

At the end of last year, there were 18 million home networks, according to Parks Associates. Right now there are several networking technologies competing for dominance in the home. John Abel chose Cat 5 Ethernet for his home, but it's actually not common to find Cat 5 cabling in homes. The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) is developing industry specifications and interoperability certification for delivering high-bandwidth digital content over in-home coaxial cables. Another standard, called HPNA from the home phone networking alliance (HPNA) takes a Category 3 home phone line that is prevalent in older homes and makes use of that technology to run high-speed data like you would over a Category 5 home network.

Increasingly, service providers are starting to notice a standard called HomePlug, which lets electricity and high-speed data run concurrently over a home's power jacks. The HomePlug Powerline Alliance defined a standard for using in-home electric networks for data in 2001. HomePlug 1.0 runs at 14 Mb/s per second, but HomePlug is working on the HomePlug AV standard, which at 200 Mb/s will be able to carry HDTV and home theater. Intellon hopes to have integrated circuits out before the end of the year. Until then, Intellon sells a product called HomePlug 1.0 with Turbo that expands the data rate to 85 Mb/s that telcos are trialing for IPTV.

With 8 million home wireless networks in the U.S., upgrading the 802.16 standard to accommodate bandwidth-hogging services such as video makes sense.

“The Wi-Fi Alliance has spent a lot of time in the last 18 months improving the standards that will make the throughput bigger to distribute TV signals,” Kuhn said.

Analysts such as Parks Associates' Scherf see a hybrid home networking approach developing. “Carriers will rely on a couple of networking solutions,” Scherf said. Home networking devices such as residential gateways and set-top boxes will likely need to support both a wired and wireless standard, he said.

When John Abel travels, he also likes to monitor his thermostat and his security systems. Abel has installed video cameras that can read a thermometer inside his home and post both the inside and outside temperatures to an IP address on a Web site. He's also rigged his alarm system to send him e-mail messages when certain security events are triggered. “The alarm system sends me pings through my network to e-mail if somebody has broken in,” he said.

If Abel wanted to, he could also install sensors to manage his home energy and security systems. The price of sensors has dropped to below $5 per sensor, making it possible not only to control the thermostats in our homes, but also to monitor our homes for security purposes. Such monitoring can determine whether the garage door is shut or whether the front door has been locked and can even manage these things remotely.

There are several competing sensors on the market, including Z-Wave, ZigBee and motes. These sensors contain radios and create mesh networks that allow them to communicate with each other and with base stations.

Makers of sensors expect that they will gradually infiltrate our homes, first in applications such as lighting, then progressing to the HVAC system and then to home security.

“People have struggled for years with the home automation concept, and it hasn't happened yet,” said Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance. “With ZigBee, homes will wind up automated, and people won't realize it's happened,” he said.

Heile predicts that consumers will install ZigBee-compliant products gradually, maybe starting with a light switch, then moving on to smoke detectors or a keyless entry for the front door. Before they know it, they've built an integrated network in their homes, and with a gateway device, they can control all of these things remotely, Heile said.

Eaton Corp.'s Home Heartbeat is one product that supports the ZigBee standard. Essentially, it's a key chain display that connects to a sensor for the front door, a heat detector from the stove, a water sensor for the hot water heater.

“If you get to the bottom of the hill and wonder, ‘did I close the garage door?’ you could look at the key chain, and it would tell you if it was closed,” Heile said.

Z-Wave sensors compete directly with ZigBee sensors in the home control market. Today, consumers can buy Z-Wave products that are centered around light control, HVAC, thermostats, access control for door locks and garage doors and security systems. Z-Wave is based on technology created by a company called Zensys.

“With Z-Wave, you could close the door, lock it with a normal key, and the lock, which is Z-Wave-enabled, sends out a signal to all the other doors that locks them, then sends out a signal to the alarm panel to arm itself, then sends out a signal to turn off the light switches and set the thermostat to 65 degrees,” said Raoul Wijgergangs, vice president of U.S. business development for Zensys. “That capability is there today.”

John Henderson has been investigating sensors called motes for a pilot on the technologically connected home with the U.S. Army, sponsored by Nielsen Media Research. Mote technology was developed at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA. These sensors can be as small as 2 millimeters square and have radios embedded in them that communicate with other sensors and a base station in a peer-to-peer network.

Experts even predict that there will be a transformation in the plain old telephone handset in our homes. With the proliferation of consumer voice-over-IP (VoIP) services, consumers will likely buy new handsets that can handle those services. Analysts say that as price points for voice-over-Wi-Fi drop, that the technology could be used in the home as a replacement for cordless phones. Net2Phone already offers a consumer voice-over-Wi-Fi service with a voice-over-Wi-Fi handset.

Companies such as Lucent Technologies are also in trials with telcos to test dual-mode cellular/voice-over-Wi-Fi phones. ABI Research predicts that shipments of dual-mode cellular/voice-over-Wi-Fi-enabled handsets will top 50 million by 2009. The value proposition for consumers increases if they can use one phone at home — and pay reduced charges over the VoIP network — and take that phone with them outside the home to use the cellular network.

Mobile phone vendors also want to turn wireless handsets into universal remote controllers for the home. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working on the Pebbles Project to create a user interface on a hand-held device that could control appliances. The idea is that as appliances have increasing capabilities to communicate, with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or some other mechanism, that consumers will be able to control them with whatever device the user brings with them.

“We're expecting it to be some kind of high-end mobile phone,” said Brad Myers, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Already, most people carry mobile phones with them, and most mobile phones are capable computers. “It comes down to a user interface issue,” he said, adding, “does it make sense to use a cell phone as a universal remote control?”

The scientists at Nokia Research Center in Boston think it makes great sense to use a mobile phone as a universal remote control. “The mobile phone is an interesting device,” said Franklin Reynolds, senior research manager at Nokia Research Center. “It has a graphical user interface, buttons, microphones so you can get voice commands and a speaker so you can get audio feedback.”

“In my living room, I have five remote controls, one for the TV, one for the VCR, one for the DVD, one for the air conditioner and a fifth one the kids won't let me throw away,” he said.

Anyone who wanted to change the channels in Reynolds' living room would have to guess which remote does that. “That can't be right — when we get to the hypothetical smart home of the future, we want to avoid making it more confusing,” he said.

Reynolds, for one, thinks that mobile phones can help to eliminate some of that confusion. “We think phones will play an important role in this smart space,” he said.

John Abel also appreciates each new advance in technology for the home. “The possibilities of technology brought to you by telecom are so phenomenal,” he said. “I consider myself fortunate to live in this time — I can't imagine what it was like to live 50 years ago, with only a wireline phone.”

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