The Connected Home Heats Up

Just in time for summer, there is a lot of activity in making the handset part of the Connected Home.

For those who don’t know, there is a vision of a connected home where devices develop an ad-hoc network and can communicate. Standardizing this has been the domain of UPnP and more recently DLNA.

While there are a growing number of devices (TVs, DVRs, Printers, …) which support Connected Home, the mobile phone has been consistently out of the picture. Now two different approaches are helping to pull the phone into the connection.

First is Nokia with the N95, using Wi-Fi as the transport to communication with other devices in the home.

But clearly there is only a small number of Wi-Fi enabled handsets, and so femtocell vendor ip.Access has put together his clever demonstration on how a 3G phone could be proxied into the connected home through a femtocell.

While there are some questions about how this works, it's a powerful vision of bringing mobile phones into the connected home.