A proposal for Wifi-hubs to be built into landlines…

Brief summary for people with too little time: slap an ADSL modem and wifi hub into every landline phone and allow them to network automatically with each other and you suddenly have a simple way to bathe an entire home in net-enabled connectivity without needing a computer. A more detailed investigation of this concept (with pictures) follows:

So I’ve been thinking a lot about ubiquitous home networks recently, and the ways in which various appliances might start hooking up to the internet and through the internet to other people – social hardware if you will – and the problem keeps coming back to how you introduce the network into the home in the first place. There needs to be a way of wrapping all the core parts of a home in a network without it being something that requires complex set-up and specialised hardware. It also seems to me that the key to true ubiquity is to detach the networking completely from a its current reliance on a computer. Your home network of the future should not require a perpetually-on computer in a cupboard. Your gran should be able to have the benefits of internet enabled appliances without having to figure out the configuration of modems and puzzle their way through a complex OS-based interface.

And if – as I assume – we’re talking about wrapping the home in a wireless network, then it also seems to me that we should be looking for a way to do all this without introducing lots more widgets and boxes and cables around the place. Ideally – we would also try and avoid having little appliances stuck into random power supplies around the house (unless of course we can take them in a different direction and use them as control nodes as well as bridges cf. Airport Express – but more on that kind of paradigm another time). Essentially, we need a model in which home, net-enabled networks are treated more like a utility than a technology – more like water or electricity provision than …

Okay – so now we’ve got the criteria in place, how should we go about making this wifi-enabled network space? Probably the place to start is at the bridge between the appliance (including potentially a computer) and the network. Since these appliance could be in pretty much every room, then the first thing we’re going to need is a series of wifi points littered around the premises. These ideally would cover the entire home, but if they couldn’t cover it completely they’d have to be in key areas like kitchens, studies, sitting rooms, bedrooms and the like. They would not be as useful initially in storage areas, hallways, lavatories, bathrooms or on stairs – although clearly it would be an advantage if the bled into those areas. These points need to be powered in some way and they’d presumably need to connect with one another as wifi bridges. One of these appliances has to be able to connect to the internet. More than likely they’ll do this via the telecommunications grid through a phone socket. And then there will have to be some kind of interface for setting up the connection and protecting it with some kind of password, encrypted and connectable to by some kind of industry standard protocol. This interface would not need to do anything else, but conceivably could do…

So here’s my contention. Given that it would seem to be a good thing to split the provision of wireless network access from computers, and given that we’ll still need an interface and given that we need a point in all the core rooms of a home and given that we need to connect this network to the telephone network in some way – isn’t the telephone itself the ideal appliance to be the heart of the home network? Unlike the television or the radio or the stereo, any place in a home where people are likely to spend a lot of time is likely to have a telephone point in or near it. They have small interfaces on them already – a numeric keypad for one and often a small LCD screen for recording input, and they’re already connected physically to the telephone network.

So here’s what I’m thinking – and forgive the slightly ugly 80s styling of the phone itself. I tried to do something beautiful and isometric but it came out looking really nasty. So we make do with gradient fills and basic Illustrator shapes…

So the ADSL modem and wifi antenna/bridge/hub are both included within the device. This means that in terms of buying a wifi network for your house, all you have to do is purchase the phone and plug it into a phone socket. By sticking an Ethernet port into the base of the phone you could immediately use it to connect to printers or any non-wifi enabled networkable device. If you bought a second phone, however, it would operate like a wifi bridge (there’s already considerable precedent for hubs also acting as bridges – with the Airport Extreme being the most recent example), extending the network around the home. If ADSL modems did not reduce significantly in cost, then perhaps you could remove that from the additional phone units, creating master and slave phones, each of which could be strung together to extend the network still further. If ADSL modems came down in price, however, it might be useful to build them into all the devices – allowing each phone unit to negotiate with the other phones as to when it should become the dominant provider of access to the internet (ie. if the connection broke down or if it became clear that one phone could provide more throughput because of the local quality of the line or intra-phone connectivity). Either way, you’d expect the network to self-organise purely by bringing a new phone home and plugging it into a socket. The blue-lines in the following image would be self-organising connections between phones based upon proximity and strength of signal:

So now we have a wifi network in the home, where all you’d need to do to extend the network is purchase a phone and plug it in. And we have a number of devices capable of connecting to the web. Except we’ve left out questions of user names / passwords / encryptions and the like. Since we’re talking of this service as a utility, then the most obvious way of handling it would seem to me to be to get your ADSL along with your telephony from the same operator. Since the operators already know the telephone number that the phone is plugged into (and will know this whenever you use a phone on that network) it seems most obvious to consider that telephone number to be your user name for connectivity and the name of the local network. This would mean that when the phone was initially connected it could attempt to connect immediately to the operator. At this stage the operator (or the phone) could generate a numeric key with which to access the network. All you’d have to do is plug the phone in and then ring up your operator. Since they already have security provisions in place to help identify a caller, they could easily determine that a user was legitimate and give out an initial code which said user could then use to login to the network.

In practice this would mean the entire process to set up the network was to plug in the phone, ring an activation number and get your code, hang up and type in the number. Any other phones you wanted to connect would just require you to plug them into the mains and type in the activation number. And then to login from any device all you’d have to do is connect to the network which was called your home phone number (Network Name: 020 7286 ####) using (again) the activation number. Piece of cake!

The process would have other possibilities too. By using a numeric key rather than an alphanumeric key you immediately open up the number of devices that can be easily set up to use the network. Numeric keypads are far more common than full text input devices and faster to use. It would take no time at all to connect your mobile phone, television, DVD player, Tivo, Radio, CD player, tape deck and computer to such a network. But that’s just the beginning. Radio Alarm clocks have keypads, Microwave ovens have key pads. In fact the only electrical things that I can see around me in my flat that don’t immediately present some kind of numeric interface are my lights, iPod, digital camera, kettle, X-box, toaster and oven – and four of those have an interface that would allow you to choose numerals in different ways.

So that’s the concept in a nutshell. I can see some problems with it with regard to the separation of telecommunications services and the necessary connections that you might need to make between hardware and service providers that might make the whole thing unfeasible. I’m also more than aware that there have been explorations about ways of connecting telephones and connectivity elsewhere – some of which no doubt overlaps, encompasses or surpasses my thoughts – and no doubt I’ve made a few errors through the piece as well, but nonetheless I thought it was an interesting enough idea to push out into the real world and to receive feedback around. And that’s what I’m after now – please feel free to leave any thoughts, fixes, suggestions or extensions below or write a post and trackback to this one, so any interested parties can follow the discussion (if there is any) more easily…