Time for bed. Just before sliding under the duvet, you press a couple of buttons on your home controller. Powered security blinds slide over the windows. All the lights in the house are turned off, along with any specified electrical devices - the cooker and washing machine, for example, not the freezer. You nod off, knowing that if you get up in the night, the bathroom lights will automatically switch themselves on at one-third power, while your handheld computer updates its list of "incident reports" from motion detectors placed around the house and garden. Yes, that suburban fox has been trying to raid the dustbins again...
Science fiction writers and journalists have been trotting out home automation stories for decades, of course. However, last week, the reality came a step closer. Two small British companies, Cyan Technology and nSine, announced chips that will enable consumer electronics products and white goods such as washing machines to be networked over the mains. The cost to manufacturers could be as low as $3 to $5 per network node. And at that price, the market could be huge: 10 to 15 billion nodes.
David Griffiths, Cyan's chief executive officer, says: "the point about consumer electronics is that it is very price-point driven. The kinds of thing we are doing with our chips have been do-able for about 20 years: the fundamental principles have been around for a long time. But the average consumer will not pay £100 a room to switch a light bulb off!"
Consumers might, however, be prepared to pay a little extra for "smart goods" that can be operated, monitored and perhaps metered remotely, if the facilities are built in. "Technology that would have been £100, 20 years ago, we can now do for a couple of pounds," Griffiths says, "and that makes it a viable product."
Peter Norman, nSine's president and chief executive officer, agrees. "We feel the technology is not the interesting part," he says. "It is the second wave, and it is coming at a consumer price point. It is a breakthrough in cost as much as in making it work reliably. It will have a big economic effect on the consumer appliance industry."
The impact could be visible fairly soon. NSine launched its nPlug in Japan with Softbank Networks and is now talking to far eastern consumer goods manufacturers. Cyan's e-Cog microcontroller is used in a "home gateway", which is being rolled out by Olameter in California. The gateway uses Amino Communications' inter-process communications standard, IntAct, which Cyan has licensed.
These systems stand some chance of reaching a mass consumer market because no one needs to install any extra wiring to use them. The network signals are sent over the existing electricity cables, and can therefore reach any device that is plugged into the mains. Norman says: "the long term game plan is to put this technology in every plug in the world."
So far it has been slow going. Some thought the future had arrived back in 1978, when BSR announced the X10 home automation system. This was the first mains-based home control system to be sold on the high street - in Tandy Radio Shack stores in the US - though it appealed mainly to computer buffs and electronics hobbyists.
X10 was also a British invention (see www.hometoys.com/htinews/oct99/articles/rye/rye.htm for Dave Rye's potted history) and while it did well enough to be still on sale, it hardly swept the world. Acorn co-founder Chris Curry also had a go at the home control market with his Red Box company in the 1980s, with less success. More recently, the market has also been targeted by an alliance of two US giants, Sun and Cisco.
Apart from the cost, mains-borne signalling has proved more difficult to implement than many people suspected. Norman describes the mains as "a very hostile environment". For a start, "it is not a network, it's a Christmas tree", he says, and this leads to all kinds of problems with reflected signals. As with mobile phone networks, you can get deep fades where reflected signals cancel one another out.
"Another problem is impulse noise," he says. "Every motor, every switch on the network is providing impulses that can destroy data."
The nSine system works as a sort of modem. All it does is move a packet of data from one place to another, but it neither knows nor cares what the data does. In other words, it is not the sort of thing consumers need to know about - an idea that Martyn Gilbert, chief executive officer of Amino Communications, takes to its logical conclusion. He thinks the technology must be so transparent that it becomes invisible, like the e-commerce involved in taking money from a cash machine.
Amino's technology is aimed at the networked appliance market including television set top boxes and "application specific video devices" such as seat-back entertainment systems. However, Gilbert says he is not surprised that internet appliances have, so far, failed in the market, because they have no value. They should be given away as part of a service, which is what people want.
"What is the value of being able to turn on a kettle from nowhere," Gilbert says, "and who is going to put the water in? Even in the days of the BBC Micro, we realised that just being able to do communications within the home was a speculative business at best and naïve at worst. The value of the network is that it allows you to connect to a service. The definition of the service has to come first; the appliances come after."
The difference nowadays, Gilbert says, is that the internet allows data to be delivered to the home. "The infrastructure is here, so now let's start putting powerline [networks] into the context of remotely managed services."
This exposes the flaw in the home automation story, and it is where Amino, Cyan and nSine are taking a different approach.
Consumers who would never be interested in automating their homes might still pay a small monthly fee for, say, a networked fridge that was monitored from outside. The service company would make sure it operated constantly at the correct temperature, and call you if someone left the door open. It would have a repairman on the doorstep with a replacement part if remote diagnostics suggested it was about to go wrong.
So don't think about buying a new washing machine. Think about "the washing machine experience" that service companies will soon be trying to sell you.
Amino Communications
A three year old technology licensing company, based in Cambridge. It designs but does not manufacture products. Founder and chief executive officer Martyn Gilbert was the principal engineer on the Acorn BBC Master computer.
Cyan Technology
A chip design company spun out of Cambridge Consultants last year to commercialise 10 years' research, it has just announced the e-Cog 16-bit microcontroller. David Griffiths is the chief executive officer. Cyan has licensed IntAct communications technology from Amino.
nSine
www.nsine.com
Young company based in Reading, which has developed the nPlug for powerline networking. Run by chief executive Peter Norman, who spent a decade at Psion. Peter Strong, co-founder and chief technology officer, was responsible for design of the Apricot microcomputer, which dominated the UK market in the early 80s.
