Home Networking For The Rich And Famous
from the and-also-for-the-rest-of-us dept
Wired Magazine has spent some time going around to the houses of the rich, famous, and ultra-networked to see their multimillion dollar home automation setups. These are people who clearly don’t care how much anything costs, and simply want the biggest and the best – and they want it now. These are toys for adults, and you can tell by the way they talk about them that they obsess about their automated home the way kids obsess about whatever fad-like toy is available this holiday season. The article concludes with suggestions for significantly cheaper equipment you might want to look into, if you want to imitate these homes – but rest assured, they’ve already moved on to something which is probably bigger and better.
Comments on “Home Networking For The Rich And Famous”
Getting it to the masses
There are already options in the professionally installed market to deliver ubiquitous digital and analog media access for a very reasonable price point using Firewire over UTP-5 – and you don’t have to be a bizzionaire to afford it. The rub is that it is fairly costly (and a hassle) to go back and lay CAT-5 through the home. So everyone is waiting for the wireless solutions, and while folks think that the solution is 80211.a, the distances media can travel with reasonable quality is not sufficient for anyone but small apartment dwellers. 80211.g is still in development at this point, but could be the breakthrough technology in enabling these media applications for home networking. However, the ugly heads of the RIAA and MPAA come back in to play due to their security concerns over delivering their IP over wireless networks.
The unwillingness of the studios and labels to work aggressively with wireless technologies that enable transfer inside the home is FAR more bone-headed than the peer-to-peer debate in my opinion. If consumers could buy products that give them more access points to their media the way the want it would promote the purchase of more entertainment products like digital music jukebox and VOD services you would have to think. That, in turn, would give consumers more of a reason to abandon pirate downloading services for subscription services delivered through their MSO like Rhapsody, etc., right?