Imagine being given $6000 and told you had to spend it all on home technologies. Where would you start? What would you buy first? Hewlett Packard (HP) and Telecom’s Xtra thought this might be a fun idea, so six months ago choose 25 New Zealand households (from 8000 applicants) to take part in a four-month ‘Connected Lives’ programme.

Each house was set up with an Xtra broadband connection, home wireless network and HP technology including a media centre, laptop and printers worth up to $6000. As long as the households completed different challenges they got to keep the technologies.

The challenges saw the households pair up and contact each other via a web cam, make a news broadcast, contact a charity online, race each other over an online connection to Xbox Live, and use digital and phone cameras to send pictures, emails and messages back to the Connected Lives team. One man even won an email challenge by being the first participant to reply in the fastest time to three emails – while his wife was in labour.

Eventually, the grand title of “New Zealand’s Most Connected Household” was won by an Invercargill family (go Southland!) but the whole exercise got us thinking: how easy is it to create a tech-spec’d home in New Zealand without HP and Xtra-special encouragement? Does it cost $6000 or can it be achieved for less? And what else can you do with 21st century technology in the home?

The network
The underlying backbone of home technology today is the voice and data network running through the house. This covers how phones, computers, PDAs, TV sets, media centres, sound systems and photo printers are connected, whether they can access the internet and if so, at what speed and cost? An increasingly popular option, and one used by the Connected Lives households, is to have one fast data (broadband) connection into the house that supports a wireless router. The wireless router can then be set up to create a wireless data network throughout the house. This wireless network uses a particular wireless standard known as WiFi.

If your house is set up with a wireless network, you can be fully mobile at home because many home technology devices will have the capacity to connect to the wireless network. These include computers, printers and laptops and some entertainment centres and PDA’s.

David Proctor, a business manager with Hewlett Packard, says if money was no object he’d be setting up his house with as few wires as possible. He’d set up a wireless network running from a broadband connection – probably Telecom’s two megabits per second (2 Mbps) Jetstream plan which at the time we went to press cost $69.95 per month (although Xtra’s Chris Thompson told us this pricing was being evaluated given ihug’s recent announcements – more on that later).A wireless kit from Xtra costs around $300 and provides do-it-yourself (DIY) instructions on setting up a wireless network and ensuring it is secure (more on security ahead).

Proctor says the wireless cards in devices and routers can be of varying quality, and to get good speed and reliability from a WiFi network it helps not having too much concrete in your house. “If you can’t avoid that, use a faster broadband connection. However, there’s no issue with wireless coverage,” says Proctor. Luke Baxter, value added service manager for Xtra, says the wireless traffic generated around a house is ‘bursty’, which describes the burst of data activity that occurs when someone initially connects to a web site, but then subsides as they spend half an hour browsing it.

“In my house we have three laptops going off the wireless network and browsing is still a good experience,” says Baxter. Beyond the Telecom/Xtra broadband plans, homes in the right areas can get also get a wired broadband connection from TelstraClear or a wireless connection from Woosh, which offers a different type of wireless network to WiFi.

Local Internet Service Providers like ihug can also hook up your house with wired broadband and offer guidance on setting up a wireless network. At the time we went to press, ihug was offering a 2 Mbps Telecom Jetstream connection for just $29.95 per month compared with Xtra’s $69.95. The catch is that if you don’t place your toll calls through IHug or if you need a bigger data traffic allowance, the charge goes up to $39.95 and beyond. The costs of a broadband plan vary a lot due to competition as does the cost of a wireless network router and kit, which can be purchased from home electronics retailers for less than $300.

However, if you’re serious about setting up a robust and secure wireless network in your home, it pays to go with the fastest broadband connection you can afford from a company well equipped to advise you and provide ongoing network support and services. It also helps to opt for a broadband plan with a generous megabyte allowance – after all, if you’ll be regularly uploading web pages or photos to your web site or downloading music and movies from someone else’s, you’ll quickly chew through smaller broadband data traffic allowances (measured in megabytes or gigabytes).

This is particularly true for homes with several PCs, media centres or laptops connected to a wireless network running from one wired broadband connection. So for example while ihug’s broadband offer is cheaper, you only get four gigabytes of data for $39.95 per month compared with Xtra’s 10 gigabytes for $69.95. The key is to think a bit about what you’ll use your broadband connection and wireless network to do, before figuring out which provider to use.

Network setup and installation
A word about the DIY tendencies of the average Kiwi bloke: according to research conducted during the Connected Lives project, Kiwi blokes like to be self-reliant when it comes to IT support – and that includes the set up of wireless data networks in the home. Of the 8000 New Zealanders who initially registered to be part of Connected Lives, almost 20 per cent said they worked through any IT questions they had themselves.

An overwhelming majority of these were male. The research also found that two-thirds of technology questions were answered within the household and that males were most often asked for help. Thirty per cent of respondents asked husbands, boyfriends, sons, sons-in-laws and fathers for assistance with IT compared with 15 per cent who asked the female members of their household.

While that’s all very pioneering and achievable, it’s reassuring to know that the basic set up of a wireless network is not overly difficult, but getting the security settings right is where DIY-ers can come unstuck. Proctor says the main aim is to prevent a wireless network from being able to be accessed by people on the street or neighbours. If others can access your wireless network, they can surf the net or download movies using your broadband data connection – and you’re paying for their connection!

Xtra says its $300 wireless kit comes with a CD with instructions on how to set up the network and encrypt it so that it’s secure. If you bring your work laptop home or have other reasons to be concerned about data security around the home, it would pay to employ an IT consultant that specialises in wired and wireless security or use a monitored security service to ensure your networks are safe. One example is Xtra’s security suite which pops McAfee security software on the devices in your home. Xtra then performs an automatic live update on this software via MacAfee each time you connect to the Internet. “The service is only delivered over an Internet connection so the software and pricing is cheaper. Customers can also call us up,” says Baxter.

Homes made of concrete will require higher inbound data speeds

The entertainment factor
Once you have a wireless network in your home and it’s secure, what can you do with it? Proctor says the first thing he would do is connect his HP media centre (which is a computer, DVD player, music player and TV) to his 5-in-1 surround sound stereo for a home theatre experience. The media centre could also be connected to a wide screen LCD TV, which would then act as the monitor for the centre. Proctor says you can sit in the lounge and surf the net from the TV screen, listen to music while the media centre grabbed album covers from the internet, or edit photos through the media centre and then wirelessly print them on a photo printer without leaving the couch.

Some media centre PCs also have TV tuners, so you can pause a TV show and have the rest of it record on the PC’s hard drive if you need to do something else. You can also pre-programme a media PC to record shows so if you come home half way through a TV show, you can then go back to the beginning and watch the recorded part of the show while the media centre records the rest of it. If you have a media centre with two TV tuners (the shops call them dual TV tuners) you can watch one show on TV, while the second TV tuner records a show on at the same time on another channel.

In the Connected Lives project, the entertainment factor the technology delivered was embraced with enthusiasm. Several households dressed up as rally drivers then sat in their lounges racing other households over Xbox Live, an online service from Microsoft that lets Xbox owners in different places compete over an internet connection. Baxter says handheld portable play stations can also be used for online gaming, online PC games are still popular, and the next generation of Xbox will have wireless controllers.

Parents with techno-phobia might like to have a lie down about now. The cost of media centres varies according to brand and whether or not the home already has a large display in the form of a TV. Proctor says HP media centre prices range from $2000 to $3000; with monitors from $599 to $1499.

Communication & information
When you’ve finished having fun, it might be time to return voice messages, check emails or work. Michael Lucas, from research company Conversa Global says 91% of the 8000 potential Connected Lives candidates indicated they accessed the internet every day. The home was the most popular place of access (94%), followed by work (57%). Seven percent said they accessed the internet at local internet cafés and 2 percent used WiFi (wireless) hotspots.

The majority of respondents also found technology extremely helpful with managing their lives, with eight out of ten respondents saying they used technology to help them manage finances. Respondents also found technology handy to manage work, travel, social arrangements and family activities.

Again, a wireless network in the home opens up new opportunities. Baxter says Connected Lives participants found it amazing that they could clear their emails while sitting on the deck in the sun (obviously Connected Lives was over by September).

Of course, you can also use a 3G data card in a laptop, phone or PDA to connect to the 3G networks of Telecom or Vodafone to check email or surf the net wirelessly; but at home it would be less expensive to use your WiFi network. People also now have options about how they will make their voice calls. For local calls, it still makes sense to use a wired Telecom or TelstraClear connection, but people can also use Internet calling software like Skype with a phone headset to connect over the internet and talk - or they can use web cams over the internet to see each other while they talk, as the participants of Connected Lives did.

Conversa Global research found that while 76% of people had never communicated with friends and family via web cam, of those who did, almost 40% used it at least weekly.

Into the future
While it would be great to have a web cam in the ironing room which you could access from your mobile phone – phew, I didn’t leave the iron on – these mobile phone services are a little into the future for home users in New Zealand. Having said that, you can set up a web cam in every room of your house and view each one through your own web site – but then so could everyone else. A better deal might be a monitored service.

Baxter says rural home and farm owners pay online monitoring organisations like the ISP Bay City to watch their farms for them while they’re away or have the farm under management. These services, which use satellite technologies, are detailed to the point where farm owners can monitor pasture to stock ratios and check the irrigation levels on paddocks through a secure online portal. A home owner sitting in Auckland could also turn off a light switch in Taranaki.

However, the benefit of being able to do this is of course offset by the cost of monitored services. Adjusting security systems, heating levels and lights and watching the kids or a sick cat from a mobile phone connection to a web cam is still a way off says the experts. Connected Lives 2010 will be interesting.

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May 2006

By Vikki Bland