Wireless Connectivity

Your World is Going Wireless

Just as we’d become accustomed to the idea of microchips being embedded in anything from clothing to food packaging, now our household appliances are communicating wirelessly with one another. The cheapness of wi-fi technology means that many new electronic devices, from televisions to thermostats to security systems, are coming together onto a single network that can be controlled remotely, not just from your armchair but from almost anywhere in the world.

This is not some pipe dream. At the vast Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, said that “plug-and-play connectivity” was central to the electronics giant’s future, adding that 90% of Sony’s product lines would connect wirelessly by 2011.

Take this scenario: you leave the office on a winter evening and use your phone to instruct the heating to come on at home. And while you’re about it you tell the oven to warm up. Once through the door, you watch a film you’ve downloaded from an online service. You stream it wirelessly to your gaming console and enjoy it in its full glory on a big-screen TV. Meanwhile, your children are each demanding that their own music playlist be delivered to the speakers in their room. No problem — they can each wirelessly pick up any of the tracks stored on your network server.

This is all feasible now. In Las Vegas, all the main television manufacturers, including LG, Panasonic, Sony and Samsung, were showing sets with wi-fi built in. This will enable them to receive not just broadcast signals but information from your computer, such as home movies, YouTube video clips and anything else you fancy watching via the internet.

At the heart of all this is the wireless local area network, or wi-fi for short. Many people have a wireless router in the corner of the room. What most don’t realise is that as well as linking your computer to the internet, it can be used to connect and interconnect many other “wi-fi enabled” gadgets. The once humble radio now comes wi-fi ready, so instead of receiving dozens of FM stations it gives you the choice of thousands of internet broadcasts from Canada to Khartoum. When a device isn’t wi-fi ready, a simple bolt-on gadget will often do the trick. Many printers, for example, can be fitted with a wi-fi adaptor in their USB port.

Bluetooth — the short-range wireless protocol found in many mobile phones — crops up in all manner of devices. Speakers, sat navs, headphones and MP3 players are increasingly being linked into mini networks, which are particularly suitable for in-car use.

Two other short-range wireless contenders are known as Zigbee and Z-Wave. Receivers and transmitters for both standards consume tiny amounts of power. The benefits are long battery lives in any products that use them, making them ideal for home monitoring and control devices such as security cameras and motion detectors, thermostats and remote controls.

The breakthrough will come when all these competing standards become compatible. Then you will be able to use your mobile phone to set the oven timer, unlock the door for the cleaner, tell your computer to record an HD TV programme and pipe wake-up music into a teenager’s bedroom from wherever you are in the world. In fact, as our illustration shows, with a bit of technical know-how you can do most of that already.

Welcome, everyone, to wireless world.

Matt Bingham and Alex Pell

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