World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
Is your dishwasher on the Net? The question may raise eyebrows now, but in a few years, even asking might seem old-fashioned. The networked, automated home is not far away as technology advances and the telecommunications and computer industries converge. Baby boomers who grew up with labor-saving inventions such as electric can openers and TV dinners may soon see the automated, robot-inhabited home, once spoofed in the cartoon series ''The Jetsons,'' become reality.
Two technology trends are creating the ''wired'' home of the near future: the connection of the home to the outside world with ever-faster Internet access and the interconnection of appliances and electronic devices inside the home. When these two things happen, the border between inside and outside blurs as functions become controllable from outside and a vast array of external information and services is accessible from within. ''There is no reason why when I'm at the store and I've got a cell phone with me, I shouldn't be able to find out what is in my refrigerator,'' says Jim Waldo, an engineer at Sun Microsystems.
Advances in data communications, such as digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modems that provide network access over cable TV lines, are now delivering high-speed home Internet access. Cable modems allow a continuous, direct link to the Internet at up to 50 times the rate of conventional phone lines. Mergers and acquisitions between telecommunications and cable companies underscore convergence in these fields and herald more competitive pressure on service pricing in the future. AT&T, for example, purchased TeleCommunications Inc., gaining cable systems available to 18 million homes. When Comcast and MediaOne, the third- and fourth-largest cable companies in the United States, planned a $60 billion merger, AT&T outbid Comcast to acquire MediaOne in a move that, despite recent glitches, shows its strategic vision includes cable.
Earlier this year, Sun Microsystems introduced Jini, a technology platform aimed at networking a variety of devices. ''Jini is an architecture that is based on the portability of the Java programming environment,'' says Mr. Waldo, who is Jini's chief architect. ''It allows service providers, such as telecommunications companies, to introduce services into a network. Clients of those services can get the code, or objects, necessary to use them as part of obtaining the service over the network, without having to install anything in particular on their computer or handset. Some services are directly implemented in hardware - services that we think of as devices being connected together. Your refrigerator, for example, might have a service that allows you to keep track of its contents and how well it is working. Services could be devices, but they could also be software - banking services, for example, or entertainment services or restaurant listings.''
In the Jini architecture, a dynamic collection of devices provides services to each other on a peer-to-peer basis as those services are needed. This ''federation of services'' represents a paradigm shift from the conventional model, in which control is centralized in a server or chip that has specific knowledge of the capabilities of all connected devices. Placing the intelligence in each device and providing the mechanism for a device to inform the network of its capabilities eliminates some of the major hassles of existing networks. ''Jini allows software to be installed as needed, automatically, as part of accessing the service,'' says Mr. Waldo. ''As new services are introduced, they can automatically introduce the code needed to access them. If a service gets changed, the new code will automatically get moved to whoever is accessing it. Users don't have to worry about version incompatibilities or having the right device driver. It comes automatically.''
This ease of use is essential to applications in the home. ''One of the design philosophies behind Jini is that smaller is better and simpler is better,'' says Mr. Waldo. ''If you need to do something complicated, you do it by putting together small, simple pieces as you need them.'' This approach makes Jini economically feasible to implement in low-cost consumer devices and makes the network both more reliable and scaleable.
''The overall vision is of a home in which the computer becomes invisible and ubiquitous,'' explains Mr. Waldo. ''All of the computers are connected together in such a way that you have access to them and the roles that they play from anywhere in your home. This encompasses things that you don't normally think of as computers - microwave ovens, refrigerators or dishwashers.''
Home appliances already contain microprocessors, as Mr. Waldo discovered when he took apart his microwave oven. ''I found that it had the same microprocessor in it as my first high-end engineering workstation. You don't think of appliances as computers. A computer inside an appliance makes that appliance better, but connecting computers together in a network, as we've seen with the World Wide Web, opens up new possibilities of control and information sharing. Once they have the connection, Jini is an architecture that gives them a very simple way of talking to each other.''
Sun has signed up an impressive list of partners from the home appliance, consumer electronics, computer and telecommunications industries, including Bosch-Siemens, Canon, Cisco, Ericsson, IBM, Kodak, Nokia, Philips, Samsung, Sharp and Sony, among others. Sony and Philips are making sure that their home audio-video inter-operability (HAVi) technology works with Jini.
Hewlett-Packard's JetSend is conceptually similar - a communications protocol for connecting peer devices that negotiate service capabilities. Initially targeted at office equipment such as printers, scanners and digital cameras, JetSend could target home devices in the future.
To ensure that home devices from different manufacturers can talk to each other and work together, a global alliance of 13 companies, including Sun, Alcatel, Lucent, Motorola, IBM, Philips and Oracle, plans to create the Open Service Gateway, a software standard based on Java.
Microprocessors keep getting faster, smaller and cheaper. Communication gets faster and cheaper. Enabling technologies like Jini make it easier to connect everything. Together, these trends create a home revolution in convenience, efficiency and accessibility.
Charles Tobermann