off topicthe home of tomorrow?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 06:33:56PM -0400, dave morton wrote:
> we are doing a major renovation this winter.
> 
> gazing into your crystal balls, i am sure most would agree that wireless in 
> some form or another, will be the future in homes (for streaming etc.), 
> however, does anyone have any thoughts on what might be useful to include 
> in our new house's hard-wiring?
> 
> i can envision a day when low voltage wiring will be the norm for lights 
> etc but what
> about 'wiring' (fibre, cat5 etc) in the home of the near future? is gigabit 
> ethernet going to stay within the wires or will it become just another part 
> of the radio spectrum as soon as bandwith glitches are cleared up?

Well I know one of my cousins (in Denmark) has done a lot of
installation of smart wiring for outlets and lights (they run power out
to everywhere, and then a control network for the switches, so that you
could program any switch to control any outlet or light in your house,
including making a switch that could turn off every light in the house
at once if you wanted.  Everything just tied pack to a small dedicated
control system.  This stuff has apparently been commen in new houses
there for 10 years now.  You can even tell it when you go on vacation to
repeat the pattern of turning lights on and off that you have done for
the last week by having it use logs of when things were turned on and
off.  Beats dumb little timers on a few lights).

> since we have the opportunity to rewire from scratch, it seems a good time 
> to consider what should be sticking out of the electrical boxes as the 
> wiring goes in. perhaps nothing more than cat5 cable will be handy for most 
> near-future needs...i don't know
> 
> i am pretty typical of most of us in this group, everything is hybrid: 
> ADSL, wired linux servers, wifi debian laptops, bluetooth for blackberry , 
> imac hardwired to a printer but remote-controlled, rogers cable, wirefree 
> phones etc, etc, etc.
> 
> for sure... all this stuff will be connected differently in just a few years
> 
> the question is, can i hedge my bets on any coming trend(s)?

Well you could always wire every room with a phone jack, cable outlet, a
few CAT6 connections (CAT6 can certainly handle gigabit), and I guess
you could always throw in a few other wire bundles for future use.

Fiber is I believe rather expensive, and mostly useful for long distance
hauls, or places where electrical isolation is required.

As for wireless, I personally expect it to fall apart once enough people
start using it that you don't get anything other than collisions and
interference.  802.11n certainly appears to be heading towards a disaster
if any of the tests of pre-n hardware are to be believed.

--
Len Sorensen
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