Home networking boom predicted

Washing machines in the year 2010 will be connected to local electricity providers so that the machine can determine when it is cost effective to wash a load, according to analysts at Dataquest.

Speaking at the Dataquest Predicts 2000 conference in Silicon Valley this week, senior analyst Todd Hanson said that in 10 years' time "sentient" homes will begin to appear where everything is interconnected using a variety of technologies such as power lines and phones lines to give different bandwidth levels.

Speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies will enable consumers to control home gadgets by voice commands, and appliances will be accessible by power companies to meter and control usage.

Home networking will be adopted in three stages, with sentient homes being the third. Although the ability to link appliances together will be the first stage, the benefit of connecting home entertainment systems, such as stereos and TVs, will be the driving force for home networking.

Analysts believe this is proven by the fact that consumers are willing to spend more on entertainment than accessing the web.

Van Baker, director of Dataquest's consumer research programme, said: "55 per cent of households in the US have three or more TV sets, which means consumers are willing to pay for entertainment content." Consumers should compare this to the uproar when ISPs raise their monthly fees by a nominal amount, he added.

The second stage will see appliances such as internet tablets and web phones entering the mass market, although these devices will not yet be available as network ready.

After that comes the integrated network when all entertainment, voice and data devices will be linked over a high-speed home connection. All content, such as music, web media and television programming, will be able to be displayed or listened to on any device.

"The notion of scheduled content will begin to fade, and push technology will re-emerge to allow for on-demand viewing content that is stored locally," explained Hanson.

An example is digital video recording technologies from Tivo and ReplayTV which allow viewers to pause or replay live television programmes.