Seamless Home Networking to Debut in 2011

By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter

When a housewife is caught in an unexpected shower in the future, she won't have to rush home to close the windows. Instead, she will be able to use her cell phone to shut the window through a ubiquitous home-networking system.

Windows are not the only things that people will be able to manage from remote places ― almost everything in the home will come under the control of its owner when home networking is fully realized.

The Ministry of Knowledge Economy predicts that it will take just a few years before the futuristic applications come to town in a full-fledged manner. Toward that end, the government is preparing standards this year.

"By definition, home networking should connect all home appliances and other features in the home at any time and at any place via a central processing unit, dubbed a gateway," Song Yang-hoi, a ministry official said.

"However, the seamless connection has been difficult up until now because houses adopt different technological standards as well as differing communication protocols. Our top priority is to fix this," he said.

The government will come up with the standards midway through this year as well as a general-purpose engine, which will bridge the differences of various technologies or communication protocols.

Starting March 2011, any newly-built apartments will have to equip its gateway with the general-purpose engine, which was developed by the state-run Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) late last year.

Old apartments will also be able to easily add the ETRI engine to their gateways as the government plans to offer the program free of charge to enable upgrades to systems.

"For example, let's say that apartments built by Samsung C&T employ a proprietary system for Samsung Electronics' home appliances. Then, people cannot connect their LG Electronics machines to the system," Song said.

"This is the biggest hurdle for the early success of home networking in Korea. If the problem is tackled, we think that the majority of homes will be connected to advanced home-networking systems by around 2015," he said.

On top of remote controlled features of various home appliances and devices, home networking promises a flurry of next-generation applications such as tele-medicine or tele-therapy.

The overall markets are exploding ― their size is expected to almost double in merely four years from $83 billion in 2008 to $152 billion in 2012, according to consultancy In-Stat.

"The issues of interconnecting different devices and telecom standards seamlessly to the gateways will come to the fore in global markets when home networking gets more significant across the world," Song said.

"Hence, our attempts at integrating all of them through a general-purpose engine will gain significantly on the global scene in the future. In a sense, we are currently preempting emerging demand," he added.

voc200@koreatimes.co.kr

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