The future's closer than you might think

One of the high-points of the Ideal Home Show at London's Earls Court last week was the home of the future, the traditional centrepiece of the exhibition.

This year there was particular fuss over the show-house of show-houses.

A consortium of companies, including Intel, BT, Microsoft and Abrocour, were making a great deal of noise about the benefits of wireless broadband-enabling the home, allowing householders to make use of advanced technologies that are already on the market, but which are otherwise inaccessible to many people.

For wireless broadband and home networking to be the centrepiece of the main show-house is surprising.

The home of the future should be just that: a shrine to technologies that are in prototype, or which do not yet exist. Instead, we saw how the home of the future could potentially be the home that is built in a mere three months' time.

These suppliers are already working with the major house builders to pre-install wireless and wired network technology at the point of construction, ensuring that wireless routers and cables are put in the best location, and out of sight.

This means that Ethernet cabling can be laid at the same time as the rest of the house wiring, making for a neat installation. It also represents an acceptance that access to the internet is now considered a utility service, and can be as transparent as access to electricity, gas and water.

According to Abrocour's chief executive, Sam Sethi, the company has agreements in place with house builders to pre-install an initial 15,000 new developments with a home-entertainment package consisting of 1MB broadband, a wireless home security system, a home server running Microsoft's Windows XP Media Centre and a 32-inch flat screen display for television and PC viewing.

As well as delivering broadband access across the home, the inclusion of a server at the heart of the development means that the homeowner now has a single point of access.

And, with the TV-friendly Media Centre front-end to Windows, users can access material such as MP3 and video files on their flat screen via the home server, as well as access the web via their TV, or any other wireless local area network (Lan)-enabled device.

Media Centre is a consumer product with a low-key position in the market, with few pre-built systems actively advertised and minimal active users.

The reason for this is simply that homes currently lack the right infrastructure to take advantage of it.

The hope is that by building properties with this kind of home entertainment/PC integration in mind, adoption will rise. For a house builder there are several benefits to be gained from equipping a new home development with Ethernet or wireless.

Beyond the ability to feed a broadband connection around a single home (or even around an entire development), the inclusion of wireless Lan means that home security systems, Voice over IP entry phones, remote lighting and heating controls (and even the remote for the garage door) can all make use of a common infrastructure, in this case 802.11b or g.

Now this does sound a little more futuristic, but it's been practical since the 1960s. Veteran racing driver Stirling Moss is famed for having one of the first automated homes created outside an exhibition - one that is still fully functional today.

Using control panels scattered throughout the house, he can control features such as lighting, run a bath from the kitchen, or turn the oven and heating on and off.

Admittedly, this is based on wired connections and does not integrate with a high-speed internet connection, but the concept is the same.

What all this shows is that the home of the future is no longer something that belongs in a Star Trek episode.

It is no different from the home you already have; the real difference is that it will be built with the internet firmly in mind.

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