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Slide 1: Smart Homes FOR DUMmIES 3RD ‰ EDITION by Danny Briere and Pat Hurley
Slide 3: Smart Homes FOR DUMmIES 3RD ‰ EDITION
Slide 5: Smart Homes FOR DUMmIES 3RD ‰ EDITION by Danny Briere and Pat Hurley
Slide 6: Smart Homes For Dummies®, 3rd Edition Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com Copyright © 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published simultaneously in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Legal Department, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 10475 Crosspoint Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46256, (317) 572-3447, fax (317) 572-4355, or online at http:// www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES OR PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY SITUATION. THIS WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING LEGAL, ACCOUNTING, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED, THE SERVICES OF A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL PERSON SHOULD BE SOUGHT. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR THE AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING HEREFROM. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE IS REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE AUTHOR OR THE PUBLISHER ENDORSES THE INFORMATION THE ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE MAY PROVIDE OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT INTERNET WEBSITES LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND WHEN IT IS READ. For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002. For technical support, please visit www.wiley.com/techsupport. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007930401 ISBN: 978-0-470-16567-6 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Slide 7: About the Authors Danny Briere founded TeleChoice, Inc., a telecommunications consulting company, in 1985 and now serves as CEO of the company. Widely known throughout the telecommunications and networking industry, Danny has written more than one thousand articles about telecommunications topics and has authored or edited ten books, including Internet Telephony For Dummies, Wireless Home Networking For Dummies (now in its second edition), Wireless Hacks and Mods for Dummies, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 PC For Dummies, and Home Theater For Dummies. He is frequently quoted by leading publications on telecommunications and technology topics and can often be seen on major TV networks, providing analysis on the latest communications news and breakthroughs. Danny splits his time between Mansfield Center, Connecticut, and his island home on Great Diamond Island, Maine, with his wife and four children. Pat Hurley is Director of Research with TeleChoice, Inc., and specializes in emerging telecommunications and digital home technologies, particularly in all the latest consumer electronics, access gear, and home technologies, including wireless LANs, DSL, cable modems, satellite services, and homenetworking services. Pat frequently consults with the leading telecommunications carriers, equipment vendors, consumer goods manufacturers, and other players in the telecommunications and consumer electronics industries. Pat is the coauthor of Internet Telephony For Dummies, Smart Homes For Dummies, Wireless Home Networking For Dummies, Wireless Hacks and Mods for Dummies, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 PC For Dummies, and Home Theater For Dummies. He lives in San Diego, California, with his wife, a fiery red-headed toddler named Annabel, and two smelly dogs.
Slide 9: Dedication I dedicate this book to my wife, Holly, and publicly and officially confess that she has a better memory and is smarter than I. Plus, she’s usually right. I thank her dearly for putting up with me while I put in long hours at the office to finish this book, including the 19 times that I was late for dinner. Okay, so that’s a low number. Okay, so Holly also doesn’t exaggerate as much as I do. In any case, I hope that she will continue to let me infiltrate the home with smart-home techniques (which she secretly likes but won’t say) and at least once say that she likes ONE thing I’ve installed. — Danny I dedicate this book to my wife, Christine, for allowing me to bore her nearly to death with long, breathless discussions of networking toys that no normal person wants to spend more than three minutes talking about, and for letting me scare the living daylights out of the dogs with remote-controlled gizmos. To thank her more completely, I promise to not bring a robot into the home — thus avoiding all those dog psychiatrist bills — well, unless it’s a robotic dog poop picker-upper! — Pat
Slide 11: Authors’ Acknowledgments It takes a lot of effort by a lot of people to put a book together. We probably can’t give proper acknowledgment to everyone who’s given us advice, opinions, and guidance as we’ve worked on this project, but we’d like to try. For this third edition, we’d like to specifically thank the following folks for sharing their knowledge and providing their extremely helpful insights into the world of the smart home. To name just a few, we’d like to thank Ian Hendler, Grant Sullivan, Marc Ceraculo, Mara White, and Jack Merrow at Leviton (sorry for leaving you guys at the dinner table during that work crisis!), Gordon Sell at Gordon Sell PR for Canton, Alex Elliot at NextAlarm, Joelle Kenealey at Coltrin Associates for Control4, Eric Smith at Control4, Julie Stern at LEGO Systems, Karl Pawlewicz from Griffin PR for Middle Atlantic, Michael Cukrow and Mark Tracy at Middle Atlantic Products, Barry Haaser at Echelon, Ralph Maniscalco at Honeywell, Michelle Laird at SmartLabs, Brad Kayton at 4HomeMedia, Casey Munck and Frank Sterns at Niles Audio, Roger Dressler and Jeanne Alford at Dolby Labs, Adam Weissman and Jeff Talmadge at Denon, Ted White at the Green Glue Company, Joel Sider at Microsoft, Dave Gilbert at Sound Seal, Steve Muellner and Andrew Corkill at Meade, and Melanie Jensen and Colleen Logan at iFit. And to all the others we forgot — thank you too! For our earlier editions of the book, Sandy Daniels kept us organized, connected, and sane. She prodded us along, set up interviews, found people we couldn’t find ourselves, and generally acted like a bulldog in breaking through corporate mazes to find the right people to interview for the book. If you ever meet her, you’ll wonder how such a nice person can be so effective. We also have built on the help of literally dozens of vendors during our research in previous editions of this book. Special thanks go to Keith Smith at Siemon, David Allred at DirecTV DSL, Jeff Denenholz at X10 Wireless Technologies, Mike Hernandez at ChannelPlus, Peter Radscliff and Jim Gist at Monster Cable, Doug Hagan at Netgear, Matt Graves and Sean Ryan at Listen. com, Nick Smith and Vanessa Tuell at Request, Tom Reed of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, Dave Thompson of CopperGate Communication, Brian McLeod at Harmony, Andrew Liu at Intel, Mel Richardson and his team at BellSouth, Lawrence Cheng at XM Radio, Tom Lucke, Fred Bargetzi, and Ray O’Sullivan at Crestron, Paul Cunningham at Cunningham Security in Portland, Maine, and George Snyder at Home Automated Living. Finally, we want to thank the Wiley team who (once again!) bought into our vision of a smart home, and made sure we crossed our i’s and dotted our t’s (or something like that). Thanks especially to Susan Pink, our project editor, and Melody Layne, our acquisitions editor.
Slide 12: Publisher’s Acknowledgments We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/. Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following: Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development Project Editor: Susan Pink Acquisitions Editor: Melody Layne Copy Editor: Susan Pink Technical Editor: Allen Wyatt, DCI Editorial Manager: Jodi Jensen Media Development and Quality Assurance: Angela Denny, Kate Jenkins, Steven Kudirka, Kit Malone Media Development Coordinator: Jenny Swisher Media Project Supervisor: Laura Moss-Hollister Media Development Associate Producer: Richard Graves Editorial Assistant: Amanda Foxworth Sr. Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com) Composition Services Project Coordinator: Patrick Redmond Layout and Graphics: Claudia Bell, Stacie Brooks, Denny Hager, Joyce Haughey, Stephanie D. Jumper, Jennifer Mayberry, Barbara Moore, Alicia B. South Proofreaders: Todd Lothery, Dwight Ramsey, Charles Spencer, Evelyn W. Still Indexer: Aptara Anniversary Logo Design: Richard Pacifico Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies Richard Swadley, Vice President and Executive Group Publisher Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher Mary Bednarek, Executive Acquisitions Director Mary C. Corder, Editorial Director Publishing for Consumer Dummies Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher Joyce Pepple, Acquisitions Director Composition Services Gerry Fahey, Vice President of Production Services Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Slide 13: Contents at a Glance Introduction .................................................................1 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes .........................................9 Chapter 1: Mi Casa, Cool Casa ........................................................................................11 Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking.............................................23 Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do..............................................................47 Chapter 4: Timelines and Budgets .................................................................................63 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center .....71 Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck — Without Breaking the Bank ..........................................................................................................73 Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It ................................................................95 Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network..............................................................................109 Chapter 8: Bringing You Music .....................................................................................129 Chapter 9: Running Audio Here, There, and Everywhere .........................................145 Part III: Now We’re Communicating!..........................165 Chapter 10: Planning a Phone System .........................................................................167 Chapter 11: : Making the Phone Connection...............................................................193 Part IV: Livin’ Off the Fat of the LAN.........................203 Chapter 12: A Cornucopia of Computers ....................................................................205 Chapter 13: All Roads Lead to the Net.........................................................................223 Chapter 14: Designing a Data LAN................................................................................247 Chapter 15: Choosing the Parts for a Wired Data LAN ..............................................259 Chapter 16: Alternatives to a Wired Data LAN ...........................................................273 Part V: Keeping the Bad Guys at Bay — Security .......295 Chapter 17: Home Security Boot Camp .......................................................................297 Chapter 18: Wiring a Security System..........................................................................313
Slide 14: Part VI: Putting It All Together — Home Automation and Control ............................................323 Chapter 19: Home Automation Extravaganza.............................................................325 Chapter 20: Making Home Automation a Reality........................................................345 Part VII: The Part of Tens ..........................................365 Chapter 21: Ten Common Pitfalls When Building Your Smart Home.......................367 Chapter 22: Top Ten Toys of the Future ......................................................................373 Index .......................................................................383
Slide 15: Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................1 About This Book...............................................................................................2 What You’re Not to Read.................................................................................2 Foolish Assumptions .......................................................................................3 How This Book Is Organized...........................................................................3 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes.................................................................4 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center.........................4 Part III: Now We’re Communicating!.....................................................4 Part IV: Livin’ Off the Fat of the LAN ....................................................5 Part V: Keeping the Bad Guys at Bay — Security...............................5 Part VI: Putting It All Together — Home Automation and Control..........................................................................................5 Part VII: The Part of Tens ......................................................................6 Icons Used in This Book..................................................................................6 Where to Go from Here....................................................................................7 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes..........................................9 Chapter 1: Mi Casa, Cool Casa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Living in Your Smart Home ...........................................................................12 Starting your day ..................................................................................12 Getting down to work ..........................................................................13 Dinner time............................................................................................14 Peace at last! .........................................................................................15 The home-network revolution ............................................................16 What’s in a Smart Home? ..............................................................................16 Why Network Your Home? ............................................................................18 What Does It Take to Network Your Home?................................................20 Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking . . . . . . . . . . .23 All Together Now!...........................................................................................23 Moving Your Network into the Closet .........................................................26 The contents of your wiring closet ....................................................27 The location of your wiring closet .....................................................28 Feeding Audio and Video from the Media Center ......................................29 The contents of your media center....................................................30 Setting up your media center .............................................................31 Choosing Cables.............................................................................................32 Cable categories ...................................................................................33 Patch me in!...........................................................................................35
Slide 16: xiv Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition Jacks and plugs for everyone .............................................................38 Modular wall outlets ............................................................................39 Investigating All-in-One Wiring Solutions....................................................40 Structured cabling systems ................................................................40 Where all-in-one systems work (and don’t work) ............................41 Makers of all-in-one systems...............................................................42 Hints for Designing a Futureproofed Home ................................................42 Racking It Up...................................................................................................44 Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47 Neat Phone Tricks..........................................................................................48 Entertainment Everywhere...........................................................................49 Save Energy — and Money Too ....................................................................50 Internet Outlets ..............................................................................................51 Remote Control of Almost Everything ........................................................52 “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up!”....................................................................53 Pool, Anyone? .................................................................................................56 To Infinity and Beyond! .................................................................................57 Connect your kitchen appliances and more .....................................57 Let your TV show you the Web ..........................................................59 Make phone calls on your computer .................................................59 Check up on your house over the Net ...............................................61 Chapter 4: Timelines and Budgets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63 New or Existing Home?..................................................................................63 What Do You Want from Your Home Network? ..........................................64 Deciding How Much to Spend ......................................................................64 Going Over the Costs.....................................................................................65 The Home Team .............................................................................................66 Starting Down the Smart-Home Path...........................................................69 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center......71 Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck — Without Breaking the Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 TV and Video Systems...................................................................................73 Analog still rules the roost — but not for long.................................74 Digital is here! .......................................................................................75 Next-generation digital TV ..................................................................75 I want my HDTV! ...................................................................................78 TV types.................................................................................................79 Video source components...................................................................84 TV Connections from the Outside World ....................................................85 Broadcast TV ........................................................................................85 Cable TV ................................................................................................86 Satellite TV ............................................................................................89
Slide 17: Table of Contents Audio Systems ................................................................................................92 Intercom Systems...........................................................................................93 xv Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95 Distance Counts in Video Signals.................................................................96 Cabling between components (A/V interconnect cables) ..............96 Cabling the video-distribution network (broadband) .....................99 Coaxial Video Networks ..............................................................................100 Coaxial cable .......................................................................................101 Coax connectors.................................................................................102 Components ........................................................................................102 Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109 Connecting Your Video Network ................................................................110 Filling your walls: Running the cables .............................................113 Tying it together: Making connections at the distribution panel ...........................................................................113 Hooking up: Making connections in the TV rooms ........................115 Summing Up ........................................................................................117 Special Needs of Satellite Systems.............................................................118 Running a one-way satellite network ...............................................118 Creating a hybrid satellite/video network ......................................119 Making satellite connections ............................................................120 And in This Corner, CAT-5e/6......................................................................122 Cut the Cord: Wireless Alternatives for Video Distribution ...................124 Use What You Already Have: Phone Line Alternatives for Video Distribution ..............................................................................126 Chapter 8: Bringing You Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129 Zoning Out: Single-Zone versus Multizone Systems................................129 Audio Connections (in the Short and Long Run).....................................131 Line level (for the short haul)...........................................................134 Speaker level (for the long haul) ......................................................134 Cables and Components .............................................................................135 Control systems..................................................................................135 Mating your amplifiers and speakers ..............................................137 Speaker cable......................................................................................139 Audio connectors ...............................................................................139 Speaker outlets ...................................................................................141 In-wall speakers ..................................................................................143 Chapter 9: Running Audio Here, There, and Everywhere . . . . . . . . . .145 Making the Big Choice .................................................................................146 Reaching for a Star.......................................................................................147 Single-Zone Simplicity .................................................................................148 Installing a single-zone, single-amplifier system ............................149 Implementing a single-zone, multi-amplifier system .....................151
Slide 18: xvi Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition Mega-Multizoning .........................................................................................152 Other Ways to Send Audio ..........................................................................154 CATching up with CAT-5e/6 systems ................................................155 Wireless systems ................................................................................158 Part III: Now We’re Communicating! ..........................165 Chapter 10: Planning a Phone System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167 Selecting Equipment for Your Phone Network .........................................168 Plug and play the old-fashioned way ...............................................168 Cordless phones .................................................................................170 Fancy phone systems ........................................................................173 Fax machines ......................................................................................177 Answering machines ..........................................................................178 External ringers/lights .......................................................................179 TDD devices ........................................................................................180 Choosing a Fixed Phone Service ................................................................180 POTS.....................................................................................................181 Connecting in new ways ....................................................................182 Voice over IP .......................................................................................185 Cutting the Cord: Going Mobile..................................................................189 Chapter 11: Making the Phone Connection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .193 What to Run Where......................................................................................193 Building the architecture...................................................................195 Plugging into a KSU ............................................................................199 Using KSU-less phone systems .........................................................200 Connecting Alternatively.............................................................................200 Taking the wireless route ..................................................................200 Adding a jack on the cheap, without wires .....................................202 Part IV: Livin’ Off the Fat of the LAN .........................203 Chapter 12: A Cornucopia of Computers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .205 Considering Computers of All Kinds .........................................................206 Choosing traditional PCs...................................................................206 Looking at laptops, desktops, and more .........................................207 Serving up files with a home server.................................................209 PDAs, PDQ: Interfacing with Handheld Computers .................................211 Monitors ........................................................................................................214 Keyboards .....................................................................................................215 Eeek, There’s a Mouse on My Desk............................................................216 Plugging in Printers and Such.....................................................................216
Slide 19: Table of Contents Beyond the PC — Next-Generation Computers .......................................219 Game consoles on the Net!................................................................220 Web-enabled TV — is it for me? .......................................................221 xvii Chapter 13: All Roads Lead to the Net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223 A World of IP Devices...................................................................................223 Analog Modems............................................................................................224 DSL .................................................................................................................227 Lighting the Way with Fiber ........................................................................232 Cable Modems ..............................................................................................234 Beaming Internet in from Satellites............................................................238 Connecting Wirelessly .................................................................................241 Power Companies ........................................................................................245 Chapter 14: Designing a Data LAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .247 Flipping the Wired or Wireless Coin ..........................................................248 Running Cables Here, There, and Everywhere.........................................250 Bedrooms ............................................................................................250 Living room .........................................................................................250 Home office .........................................................................................251 Home theater or media center .........................................................251 Kitchen.................................................................................................252 Other places........................................................................................253 Migrating Your Computer Flock to the Net...............................................253 Understanding home-network routers ............................................254 Using your PC to route packets ........................................................257 Chapter 15: Choosing the Parts for a Wired Data LAN . . . . . . . . . . . .259 Building CAT-5e/6 LANs ...............................................................................259 Cables and Connectors ...............................................................................263 The network components .................................................................263 NICs galore ..........................................................................................266 Software to put it all together...........................................................268 Visualizing How a Data LAN Works............................................................268 Working with your Internet connection ..........................................269 Integrating with no-new-wires networks .........................................270 Chapter 16: Alternatives to a Wired Data LAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .273 Cut the Cord!.................................................................................................274 Understanding the standards ...........................................................274 Is it time for N?....................................................................................278 Back to base(ics) ................................................................................279 In the NIC of time................................................................................280 Battening down the hatches .............................................................281 Putting together a wireless LAN .......................................................283 Extending a wireless LAN with WDS ................................................285 But wait — there’s more to wireless networks...............................287
Slide 20: xviii Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition Making the Most of Your Phone Lines.......................................................289 Powering Your Network ..............................................................................290 Mixing and Matching ...................................................................................294 Part V: Keeping the Bad Guys at Bay — Security........295 Chapter 17: Home Security Boot Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .297 Deciding That You Need a Security System..............................................298 Security Basics .............................................................................................299 Getting control of your security panel ............................................300 Don’t panic — use your keypad! ......................................................300 You fill up my sensors........................................................................301 Sirens....................................................................................................305 Monitoring...........................................................................................306 Gathering Your 007 Security Equipment ...................................................306 Video surveillance..............................................................................307 Audio surveillance .............................................................................309 Finding and Installing the Right Security System.....................................310 Hardwired systems.............................................................................310 Wireless systems ................................................................................311 Getting someone to do the job .........................................................311 Chapter 18: Wiring a Security System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .313 How to Prewire .............................................................................................313 Running a security loop.....................................................................314 Wiring choices ....................................................................................314 Wiring for wireless .............................................................................315 All Zoned Out................................................................................................316 Super supervision ..............................................................................317 Wireless supervision..........................................................................318 Connecting to Other Systems.....................................................................318 Phone line interfaces .........................................................................318 Alternative phone line interfaces .....................................................320 Home-control interfaces ....................................................................320 Audio interfaces .................................................................................321 Broadband interfaces ........................................................................321 Part VI: Putting It All Together — Home Automation and Control .............................................323 Chapter 19: Home Automation Extravaganza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .325 Where an Automated Home Begins — and Ends .....................................325 Understanding the Protocols......................................................................326
Slide 21: Table of Contents Understanding the Components ................................................................329 Modules ...............................................................................................329 Switches...............................................................................................332 Controllers...........................................................................................333 Lights, AC (Powerline), Action ...................................................................338 Control Networks for Entertainment Systems .........................................341 Using RF remotes................................................................................342 Using a wired IR repeater system.....................................................343 xix Chapter 20: Making Home Automation a Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .345 X10 Marks the Spot ......................................................................................346 Building bridges..................................................................................346 Keep those nosy (or noisy) neighbors off your powerline ...........347 Boost that signal.................................................................................348 Surge protectors kill powerline signals ...........................................349 Wire those switches right..................................................................350 Controlling Your Home-Automation Systems...........................................351 Keeping it simple ................................................................................351 Adding a computer for more control ...............................................352 Making your home interactive..........................................................353 Getting IR Around the House ......................................................................357 Making your coaxial cable work overtime ......................................358 Being dedicated ..................................................................................360 Part VII: The Part of Tens...........................................365 Chapter 21: Ten Common Pitfalls When Building Your Smart Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .367 Missing the Basics of Automation..............................................................367 Not Reading the Manual ..............................................................................368 Thinking That AC and Low Voltage Are Friends.......................................369 Using the Weakest Link................................................................................369 That PPPPPP Thing......................................................................................370 Thinking That Wiring Is a Dirty Word........................................................370 Falling into the Proprietary Pitfall .............................................................371 Tumbling into the All-in-One Trap .............................................................371 Forgetting to Add Conduit ..........................................................................372 Not Bothering to Use Labels.......................................................................372 Chapter 22: Top Ten Toys of the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .373 Robotic Servants ..........................................................................................373 Networking the Family Sedan .....................................................................374 Losing Weight on the Internet ....................................................................375
Slide 22: xx Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition Figuring Out Which CD to Play...................................................................376 Serving Up Video on Your Screen ..............................................................377 Giving a Concert...........................................................................................377 Gazing on a Starry, Starry Night.................................................................378 3D Home Theater .........................................................................................378 Putting the “Motion” in Motion Pictures...................................................380 Playing with LEGO, the 21st Century Way ................................................381 Index........................................................................383
Slide 23: Introduction elcome to Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition. This book is the first to specifically tell you how to futureproof your home to take advantage of the present and upcoming gee-whiz things that can make your home a 21st century castle. Very few things can prepare you for the massive changes that are taking place due to the innovations offered by an interconnected world. The Internet and electronic commerce are changing the way we live, the way we work, and the way we play. (We hope there’s more of the last one!) We’re so used to going to stores and buying things. To calling toll-free numbers so we can ask questions and order products. To going to school to learn. To going to the movies to watch the latest Harry Potter release. To going to the music store to buy the top-of-the-charts CDs. Now it can all come to us. We can buy things through our TV sets. We can ask questions and videoconference through our computers. We can attend classes through computer-based training. We can click our remote controls to get video-on-demand. We can download new CDs, live, over the Internet. It’s at our doorstep. The question is, “Can you let it in?” Without a home network, all this might stay outside, or in the TV room, or trapped in that attic office of yours. A home network opens the world to your entire household, and now more than ever is the time to plan. That’s what Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition, provides — a plan for your networked future. If you plan nothing and simply go with the flow, ordering new capabilities from your cable or telephone company when available, you’ll find that they’ll start deciding how your home network should be built and operated. This is dangerous because they will not think about what’s best for your home — rather, they’ll install whatever gets their technicians in and out of your home the fastest. These companies are also not looking at your big picture. In this book, we help you understand how your home can be compatible with what they want, and still keep your vision of a whole-home network too. Read on! W
Slide 24: 2 Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition About This Book Within these pages, you’ll find a number of technologies and issues relating to developing digital smart-home technologies. Following are some of the things you discover: What a home network is, and what it takes to build one The key points to think about before starting to conceptualize a homenetwork design What the various home-network devices and services do What’s involved in making a home-entertainment center accessible throughout the house What you need to create a home-security network Your options for dressing up your home-telephone capabilities The best way to design a home-data local area network (LAN) The ways to boost your in-home wireless LAN and cell phone signals The best way to connect your home to the Internet What’s coming down the road and into your home in the future Some of the networks and issues that we cover in Smart Homes For Dummies are in the realm of the do-it-yourselfer, so we present the big-picture stuff for those readers and give high-level instructions. These instructions don’t go into stuff such as removing your drywall and running cables through your house. We recommend Home Improvement For Dummies by Gene Hamilton, Katie Hamilton, and the editors of HouseNet (published by Wiley Publishing, Inc.) if you need help with that stuff. And if you don’t feel comfortable running cables through your house, hire a professional! If you’re renovating a home, building a new home, or trying to figure out how to connect anything with anything else in your home, you need Smart Homes For Dummies to make sure you’re getting what you need — not what your builder happens to be selling. What You’re Not to Read Smart Homes For Dummies isn’t a novel. You don’t have to read page 1 before going to page 2. So that means that you can just flip around through the book and start wherever you like. You won’t feel lost.
Slide 25: Introduction You can use the Table of Contents at the front of the book to find out where to look for a topic that interests you, whether it’s distributing a DVD signal from your home-entertainment center to your bedroom, or making your lights go on and off by themselves. Or you can search the index for a particular term that interests you. However you find the information, read it and then put the book back on the shelf. That’s how this book is meant to be used. 3 Foolish Assumptions This book is for everyone. Few people don’t have a TV, radio, or some sort of computing device that would benefit from being networked in the future. Although it’s easy to say now that computers are only for families in certain financial brackets, within a few years, many TV sets will start shipping with Internet connectivity options on-board. So, if you want to make the most of your home’s electronic systems by networking them, you need to read this book or one like it. You’ll get the most out of this book if you’re remodeling or building a home, because you’re in a position to run wires through your walls. Apartment dwellers can do some of the stuff that we outline in this book (using wireless technologies), and they can get cool ideas for when they do buy their homes. One big assumption that we (and many in the industry) have had to get out of our heads over the past few years regards wireless technologies. Some folks have taken the position that today’s wireless technologies (and nonew-wires technologies that leverage existing phone and power lines) have eliminated the requirement to put network wiring in your walls. Well, wireless is great — it can be an invaluable complement to a wired network. If you live in an apartment or condo and can’t get inside the walls to run new wire, wireless may even be good enough to build your entire network around. But if you live in a typical home, we think you’re going to find that a wired network is more capable, more reliable, and more flexible. And a wired infrastructure can be a good investment that pays you back if you sell your home. How This Book Is Organized We realize that not everyone is going to want to do everything we discuss in the book. So we broke the book down into distinct parts, each of which tackles a different aspect of building a smart-home infrastructure. Part I is the high-level, 50,000-foot view — describing why you might want to create a smart home. Parts II through V look in depth at how to design your home and home network to take advantage of all the neat things coming down the road in each of the major zones, and Part VI tells you how to interconnect them all.
Slide 26: 4 Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Part I describes where we’re trying to get to: our future-proofed home. We talk about the different major network zones of your home: your entertainment system, your security system, your phone system, and your computer system. We talk about all the other things that you might want to link and why you’d want to do that. And finally, we talk about how you can start thinking about the various things you could accomplish with a fully networked home — your smart home. Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Part II looks at how to make your home an entertainment center. You find out about creating not merely a home theater, but a true home-wide entertainment complex. How do you listen to your favorite CD from anywhere in the house? How do you share a satellite dish among multiple TVs. How do you watch your napping baby from your living room TV? We tell you how to sensibly build a media backbone in your home without breaking your bank account. We help you plan for things such as flat-screen TVs, intercom systems, whole-home audio systems, gaming consoles, and satellite systems. We talk about your wiring (and wireless) options for communicating with each part of your home-entertainment complex. Part III: Now We’re Communicating! Part III delves into the world of telephones. Life used to be simple in this area. If you wanted a new phone, you could go to the local department store or Radio Shack and buy one. Now you have all sorts of complications in this area. You can choose a multiline phone, a 2.4-GHz or 5-GHz cordless, a VoIP phone, a Skype phone, a screen phone, a combined phone-fax-printerscanner, an answering machine, central-office-based voice-mail services, and a whole lot more. We help you craft your home-telephone network so that you can communicate with anyone from anywhere — without all that scratchy static, we hope.
Slide 27: Introduction 5 Part IV: Livin’ Off the Fat of the LAN Part IV looks at your computer zone. A smart home has a high-bandwidth backbone connection running throughout the house, so you can tap into your data autobahn wherever you like. We help you understand how you can play networked games, share files between computers, print or fax from any computer in the home, or even get the whole family on the Net, at the same time! We look at the world of DSL, cable modems, HughesNet dishes, wireless Internet connections, electrical data connections, and more. Wired or wireless, we help you plan and design a computer LAN for your home. We guide you through the maze of wiring options to make sure that if you want to surf the Net while mowing the lawn, you can. Part V: Keeping the Bad Guys at Bay — Security Part V takes you through our home-security boot camp and looks at everything you’d want to do to secure and protect your home. We describe not just fire and burglar alarms, but also video doorbells, closed-circuit TV, driveway sensors, and ways to watch out for your kids. We help you plan your way to a more secure and protected home. Part VI: Putting It All Together — Home Automation and Control Part VI brings it all together — the ultimate guide to home networking. We walk you through a whole-home approach to network design. We provide home-design and home-layout tips and expose you to the various products on the market for centralized home networking. Want to fire up that coffee pot while you’re still asleep? Or how about setting the mood with automated lighting? We look at all the latest trends and gadgets governing home automation, including the details about X10, ZigBee, Z-Wave, and Insteon.
Slide 28: 6 Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition Part VII: The Part of Tens Part VII is the infamous Part of Tens, where we give you ten common pitfalls to avoid when automating your smart home and the top ten toys of the future. Icons Used in This Book We use helpful graphical icons to point out items of interest — sort of like Kodak Picture Spots at Disney World. These icons are meant to encourage you to pause and take in what we’re saying at that point. Following are the icons we use. This is the fun stuff. This icon highlights neat new technical and other advances that are just arriving or not too far away. It’s like a free pass to the World’s Fair and a glimpse at the World of the Future. This is a helpful reminder to do certain things, which translates to “we’ve forgotten to do this so often that we put it here just to remind ourselves.” When you see this icon, you may want to wait to make a decision until the industry decides which way it wants to go. Remember the Betamax VCR? A few people in every crowd raise their hands and ask what’s underneath the hood, so every now and then we stop to point out some of the neat stuff that makes the technology work. (We say neat because we’re nerdy enough to enjoy writing about it.) This icon highlights a shortcut or timesaving secret that we wished someone had told us before we learned the hard way. This is never a good icon to see. It means you’re working in a part of the Internet or your computer that’s dangerous. It’s like knowing the Wicked Witch of the West is in your neighborhood and you’re wearing the ruby slippers. Be careful. This icon tells you about a wireless technology that you can use instead of ripping your walls out.
Slide 29: Introduction 7 Where to Go from Here To help you keep up with the latest and greatest in smart-home devices and technologies, we created a companion Web site. Just type www.digitaldummies.com in your favorite Web browser, and you can catch up on the latest smart home news, find bonus material that we just couldn’t fit into the book, and read our reviews of the coolest new gadgets. See something that is not quite right? A typo? Something we should correct in the next edition? Drop us an e-mail at dummies@telechoice.com. Whew! As Willy Wonka says, “So much time, so little to do . . . reverse that.” Let’s get going!
Slide 30: 8 Smart Homes For Dummies, 3rd Edition
Slide 31: Part I Future-Perfect Homes
Slide 32: n the olden days, your home network was basically comprised of electrical wires and phone lines, with a smattering of alarm wiring here and there. Now your home network covers all sorts of wiring and wireless options, to connect any of a number of different devices — including your car and your microwave. You can connect home-entertainment systems, security systems, computer networks, telephone systems, and appliances and come up with all sorts of neat applications to help make your home living simpler and more enjoyable. In this part, we tell you all about the potential of a home network. We discuss the major elements of a whole-home network and describe the advantages of connecting them together. We also give you some advice on how much everything will cost, and show you what the finished product (a networked home) will look like — inside the walls! By the end of this part, you’ll be more excited than ever about hooking everything together. I In this part . . .
Slide 33: Chapter 1 Mi Casa, Cool Casa In This Chapter Looking at a day in the life of your wired home Understanding what goes into a wired home Quantifying the benefits of a home network Outlining the requirements for a home network I f you stop the average person on the street and start talking about home networks, he or she would probably make references to ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX, or mention the Home Shopping Network or some other cable network show. Network, until recently, has meant little else to most people. But times, they are a changin’. The invasion of telecommunications into all aspects of life is creating a different meaning of the word network. Most people have had some contact with a network through their work environment — computer local area networks (LANs) in the office, control networks in factories, telephone networks in many mid-sized or larger businesses . . . heck, the Internet is a huge network. You can think of networks simply as things that help you do your work. As you concentrate on printing a document, calling up a database, or checking out the price of a product online, the network is invisible (that is, until it’s broken). The network concept has begun to move from the workplace to the home, and smart home builders and remodelers (and forward-looking owners of otherwise perfect existing homes) are starting to think in terms of wiring (or wirelessing) their homes both to make use of a network today and to futureproof against upcoming requirements. Before you go any further, do this little exercise (don’t worry, we won’t grade you): Write down all the things in your house that you think you may want to network. Be as creative as you can. Think about your lifestyle and the way your house is set up. When you finish, put the list aside and continue to read this chapter. Toward the end, we’ll share our list with you.
Slide 34: 12 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Living in Your Smart Home Your smart home can seep into all aspects of your life. It helps you do those day-to-day tasks that can take up so much time, such as opening the draperies, dimming the lights, and flipping on the Weather Channel to see whether the kids have a snow day. How far you go with your smart home depends on your lifestyle, budget, and tastes. This section spends a virtual day in a fictitious smart home. Here’s the scenario: You, the reader, are part of a family of six, plus the requisite pets (we prefer dogs). You and your spouse both work, and the kids range in age from 8 to 17. Starting your day Anyone with kids knows the importance of keeping on a schedule. Your home network helps you do just that, in style. At first light, you wake to your home-controlled alarm — a stream of pleasant classical music coming over your home-audio network into your bedroom. After a preset length of time, the music fades out and the TV kicks on to your favorite local station, where you can get the weather and traffic reports and information about any school closings or delays. Down the hall, the kids awaken to the music of their choice. In the kitchen, the coffeemaker starts brewing your morning caffeine requirements. Select shades and drapes throughout the house open to let the day’s light stream in. It’s winter, so the towel warmers and the radiant heat in the bathrooms’ floors are turned on. The automatic pet door out back opens and lets the dog out for his morning constitutional. By this time, you’re already in the kitchen making school lunches. Being the nice person you are, you take a cup of coffee to your spouse, who is listening to National Public Radio in the bathroom. As you finish setting out breakfast for the kids, a glance at the upstairs monitors shows that two of your four kids are still in bed. Your eldest son is videoconferencing with his girlfriend on his computer. You punch the intercom and tell them all to get a move on. As the children cycle into and out of the bathroom, the home-control system times their showers to make sure no one hogs the bathroom. The shower’s water temperature is just to their liking, but that’s hardly a surprise — it’s the same setting they use each day this time of year.
Slide 35: Chapter 1: Mi Casa, Cool Casa As you sit down to breakfast, your spouse comes running through, late for the office. A printout of major headlines and personal stock standings sits waiting in the printer, having been created and downloaded from the Internet overnight. Your spouse works down the street (we did tell you that you work at home, didn’t we?), and your smart home knows that you both like a warm car when you get into a 15-degree garage, so the home controller starts the car 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time. Before your spouse climbs inside the toasty car, the home-control system gives a verbal reminder to put the bottles and cans next to the curb because today is recycling day. As your spouse leaves the garage, your home-control system talks to your phone system and redirects all of your spouse’s home-business line calls to the car phone. Once at work, a simple push of a speed dial button on the office phone dials in and redirects the calls again to your spouse’s office. Back at home, you confirm that the kids caught the bus by using the video monitor in the kitchen, and then you get ready for work. You ask the home controller to put the house in your personal mode — in terms of temperature, music, lighting, drape settings, and anything else you may have set. 13 Getting down to work You get a second cup of coffee and decide to work for a while in the sunroom. You tell the home controller where you are, and the controller transfers all your business calls to the extension near the table. Your laptop is wirelessly connected to your server and the Internet. You check your various e-mail accounts and voice mail and make a few conference calls on the multiline home-telephone system. While you’re on one phone call, you turn on the TV to access the local online directory and navigate to the ordering page for that posh take-out shop down the street. Twenty minutes later, the delivery person arrives at the front door; you take your wireless two-line headset phone — conference call and all — to the door, where you tip the delivery person (you paid over the TV set) and retreat back to the sunroom for lunch. For a midafternoon break, you head for the exercise room to work off some of that lunch. When you enter, you announce yourself to your voice-activated home-automation system, and it automatically sets the music and other environmental settings to your previously defined preferences. You sit down at your rowing machine, which has a large monitor that shows real-life settings of popular rowing locales.
Slide 36: 14 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Halfway through your workout session, a delivery person shows up at your door. An announcement that someone is at the door interrupts the music, and the nearest video display shows a picture of who it is. You don’t want to stop mid-workout, so you reply that you are busy and ask him to leave the package inside the door. You prompt for the control system to unlock the front door, and watch as the front door unlocks itself and the delivery person places the packages in the foyer. He leaves, and you start rowing again along Boston’s Charles River. It’s your turn for a temperature-controlled shower, where you listen to CNN from the TV set, via moisture-resistant speakers mounted in the bath. Squeaky clean, you go back to work. At 3:00, you have your first videoconference of the day from your office downstairs. While in the basement, you call up your home-control system and start the roast cooking in the oven. The kids drift home in the afternoon and spread out across the house. While you access your corporation’s data network, your kids take advantage of the computers. The youngest kids — twins — play multiplayer games on the home’s high-speed Internet connection. Your eldest daughter logs onto the school’s educational network to do research for the midterm paper due next week. And your son, when home from football practice, logs onto his school’s network to collaboratively work with three others on a joint presentation for the next day. Instant messages, e-mails, and file transfers all flow with ease. The home controller’s voice enunciator reminds you that the roast should be done by now, and you head upstairs. Dinner time Meanwhile, at work, your spouse glances at the clock and remembers in a panic that the family needs groceries. A quick dial into the home LAN yields the grocery list on the computerized message board in the kitchen. On the way home, a phone call into the home controller redirects calls back to the car phone in case someone tries to call. The magnetic driveway sensor tells the home-control system to announce your spouse’s arrival. As your spouse enters the house from the garage, the home controller again redirects all calls to the home office, completing the day’s cycle. As your spouse brings the groceries into the kitchen, you receive a kiss (sorry, not automated). Ready to eat, you ask the home controller to set dinner mode in the dining room. A microphone in the light switch hears the command and dims the
Slide 37: Chapter 1: Mi Casa, Cool Casa lights and turns on the gas-driven fireplace. The home-control system selects some family-oriented music from the MP3 server and plays it over the in-wall speakers in the dining room. After dinner, you start cleaning up as your kids race to their rooms to finish their homework. Later, they watch a TV special in the living room, while you take in an old Spencer Tracy movie in your bedroom. In the meantime, your spouse has a late videoconference in the home office downstairs with clients in Japan. Occasionally, you access the picture-in-picture (PIP) capability on your TV set to check around the house, making sure that no one is getting into any trouble. After the movie, you give a simple command to the home controller and the lights are dimmed, the temperature in select zones is lowered, shades and draperies close, nightlights come on, and the intercom goes into monitor mode for the youngest kids, in case they’re sick during the night. (The sound from those monitors plays only in the master bedroom area.) 15 Peace at last! With the kids asleep for the night, you decide to take a nice relaxing bath. You instruct your home-control system to prepare the bathroom — dim the lights, open the skylight, run the bath at your favorite temperature, turn off the telephone extensions nearby (route them to voice mail instead), and play your favorite album on the bathroom speakers. While lounging in bed watching the wide-screen TV, your spouse tells the home-entertainment system’s PVR (personal video recorder, a hard-drivebased system that can record video digitally) to search the shows it has been archiving every day and play the most recent Enterprise! episode. Your house is in off-hours mode. The dog is inside, and the doggy door is secure. All phones have muted ringing volumes; some don’t ring at all. All drapes are closed. The temperature is lower to save energy when your family is tucked in tight under the covers. All security systems are now alert, looking for movement outside the house. After your bath, you climb in bed and read for a while. You finish your electronic book and decide you want to read the sequel right away. You surf the Web from your TV set, find the book, buy it, download it to the home LAN and thus to your electronic book via a wireless connection. Your dishwasher kicks on at midnight when the rates are low (you loaded it at dinnertime and turned it on, but the home controller activates it when rates drop). All night long, your home controller and its various sensors keep an eye on everything for you. You sleep peacefully.
Slide 38: 16 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes The home-network revolution What’s brought about this progression of intelligent home networks into everyday life? One word: computers. And when we say computers, we don’t mean only the PC sitting on a desk in a spare bedroom in 60 percent of American homes (although that’s an important part of it). We mean also those little blobs of silicon that reside in so many things in your house, such as phones, televisions, refrigerators, and even the car in the garage. Most of these systems are islands of computing power plugged into the power outlets of your home. The computer chips have no way of talking to each other or sharing the information that they gather and control. The network revolution — the home-network revolution — is taking place as these things begin to talk to each other. Imagine a refrigerator that talks to your electrical utility and goes into its power-hungry defrost mode when the electricity rates are lowest. Or suppose after a power outage that all your clocks reset themselves automatically because they’re set to “network time.” Home networks aren’t as advanced as the Jetsons’ home, but they will be soon. And you’ll be missing the boat if you build a new home or remodel your existing one without taking this kind of future into account. Although you can’t know today exactly what will be connected to what (and how) tomorrow, you can design a wiring system for your home that will enable you to do the most you can today and be ready for tomorrow’s needs. What’s in a Smart Home? A smart home is a harmonious home, a conglomeration of devices and capabilities working according to the Zen of Home Networking. At the beginning of this chapter, we suggested that you make a list of all the things you might want to network. Following is our list. Notice that practically anything in your home can be, and ultimately will be, networked. That’s the whole point of whole-house networking: Household items: Drapes and shades, gates, garage doors, door locks, doorbells, lights, dishwasher, refrigerator, heaters, alarm clocks, washer, dryer, microwave, coffeemaker, hot water system, air conditioners, central vacuum system, water controls (shower, sink, and so on), pool cover, fireplaces, toys, e-books, lawnmower, cars and other vehicles, piano, weather station, furniture
Slide 39: Chapter 1: Mi Casa, Cool Casa Audio and video: Receivers, amplifiers, speakers, VCRs, CD players, DVD players, PVR players, TVs, WebTV devices, Apple TV devices, DSS dish, radios, remote controls, gaming consoles, cable TV devices, TV videoconferencing devices Security: Baby monitor, video cameras, surveillance monitors, motion detectors, smoke detectors, occupancy sensors, pressure sensors, infrared sensors, intercoms, voice enunciators Phones: Corded phones, cordless phones, 900-MHz phones, 2.4-GHz phones, 5.8-GHz phones, fax machine, answering machine, PDAs, screen phone, video phone, cell phones Computers: PCs, Macs, laptops, modems, scanners, printers, home servers The key is getting information to and from each of these devices. That takes a network. Your home network is actually a collection of networks. Communications in and among different devices travel over various network layers, such as your home-telephone network, your computing network, your security network, your electrical communications network (yes, you can talk over your electrical lines, believe it or not), and so on. These collectively are what we call your home network, and you mix, match, and jump among these network layers as you communicate throughout your household. 17 History of home wiring Traditionally, homes have been wired for only two things: power and telephones. Add a few haphazardly run cable-TV outlets and some doorbells, and you have the sum of the wiring in most homes. Some people put in an alarm system or an intercom system, each with its own set of wires. The result is a house with an expensive bunch of wires that don’t talk to each other and aren’t good for anything else. Even more important than the quantity of wires is the quality, especially when it comes to home automation and high-speed data services. Wiring systems that are inadequate for the needs of today’s wired citizens occur not only in homes wired 50 years ago but also in many new homes. Older low-voltage wires (telephone and cable TV wires, for example) don’t have adequate capacity for high-speed data use or for multiple lines. They don’t go to enough places in the house, and they have no flexibility of configuration. When your needs change, you’ll probably have to rewire. Even electrical power cables may be inadequate (and not just because you don’t have enough outlets) for home-automation and control systems to do such tasks as turn on lights and start the coffeemaker. These systems require a power system that is adequately isolated from interference and line noise, which is not the case in many homes. Luckily, overcoming these problems isn’t difficult — or even that expensive. All you need is a little knowledge and a good plan!
Slide 40: 18 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Home servers Traditionally, you buy a lot of boxes for your house, such as VCRs, DVD players, and CD players. As the movement towards digital storage has blossomed, you find VCRs with hard disks and CD jukeboxes that can store hundreds of CDs. We call these boxes servers because they mimic the role of computer servers in a corporate environment. There’s a movement afoot to merge all of these servers into a home server that stores CDs, DVDs, games, software, and more and “serves” its content to devices that want to play that information. These also will access the Internet for easy access to online content such as iTunes (www.itunes.com) or YouTube (www. youtube.com). Gaming consoles such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are trying to become such central repositories, and Microsoft has launched a new product called (not surprisingly) Windows Home Server (in beta at the time of this writing at (http://connect.microsoft. com/WindowsHomeServer). You’ll also see home media centers in PC and standalone stereo gear that target the same market. Home servers will range in price from $400 to more than $25,000, depending on what and how much you are trying to store. We think every home should have a home server of some sort. A home server makes finding things less difficult and creating backups easier, and certain programs such as iTunes run better when everything is in one place. Our approach to home networking in this book enables you to connect a home server whenever you decide to get one. Why Network Your Home? A network allows you to do a bevy of things. For instance, you can Access the Internet from anywhere in your house: A home network lets everyone share in the broadband wealth, so you can stop fighting over the one computer with the high-speed connection. What’s more, by having a communications backbone (wiring infrastructure) in your house, you can let anything — from your TV set to your car — tap in and make use of that connectivity. Remotely control your home: After your home network is connected to your other networks, such as the Internet, you can suddenly do amazing things from almost any interconnected spot. The capability to control a device after it is hooked up to the network is limited only by the openness of the device itself. (In other words, the only limit is the degree of controllability of the device — your home’s infrastructure won’t hold you back.) Want to turn off the lights downstairs from the bedroom? Click your remote control, and out go the lights. Want to check the babysitter while you’re at your neighbor’s July 4th bash? Just use the neighbor’s computer to log into your home’s controller and check up on things. (You can even use your cell phone to do this!)
Slide 41: Chapter 1: Mi Casa, Cool Casa Save time: Think about how much time it takes every day to open the shades, turn on the morning news, let the dog out, and so on. Wouldn’t you like to do all that (and more) with one command? By programming these chores into task profiles, you can. Save money on electronics: With a true home network, you have to buy fewer devices to outfit your home. Instead of having a VCR hooked to every TV set, for instance, you can centralize this functionality and distribute the signal around the house through remote control as you need it. The same is true of almost any network-connected device, such as a DSS satellite receiver, PVR, and cable box. Save money on communications costs: By centralizing access to certain telecommunications services, you can cut monthly service costs. For instance, with a home-network backbone, both you and your spouse can connect to the Internet on separate computers while sharing one line and one account. What’s more, you can share a high-bandwidth option — such as a cable modem, DSL link, or HughesNet-type satellite service — with the entire family. You might be ahead of the pack and already have a single broadband link to share with everyone at home. But if your connection is like ours, it can go down a lot. We’re seeing the movement towards homes with two broadband connections (one as a backup). Being able to have the kids do homework and mom and dad do their necessary browsing is starting to become mission-critical. So a home network will help you share this backup line too! Save money on your home expenses: A wired home can turn back those thermostats when you’re away on vacation or cuddled under your blankets at night. It can turn lights off automatically, too. Over time, you may save a surprising amount in heating, cooling, and electricity costs. Save money on the future: At different times in your life, you may find yourself changing the way you use certain rooms — a guest room becomes a nursery or the garage becomes an office, for example. Changes like these can be expensive if you try to bring your network along for the ride. Instead, have a flexible home-network design — one that’s futureproofed for all sorts of contingencies — and save money down the road. Be more flexible and comfortable with your technological assets: A home network frees you from being tied to one spot for one activity. For instance, when working late at night, you might want to move the laptop to a comfy recliner instead of a damp basement office. And you can with a distributed means to access the Internet — and therefore your centralized e-mail, calendar, and contact database. The latest home networking technology will route your HDTV signals around your house, freeing your TV set to be anywhere a wireless signal can reach! 19
Slide 42: 20 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Lose more fat: A smart home won’t stop you from eating chocolate cake, but it will spice up the exercise room. You can run Internet access, CNN, or exercise videos over your home network to help you keep pace and pass the time on a treadmill or bicycle. And, with Internet access, you can access many of the neat new software programs that combine with new exercise equipment to provide passing scenery or live competitors as you row, row, row your rowing machine! What Does It Take to Network Your Home? Okay, so you have the big picture: A networked home is a happy home. What does it take to get there? Surprisingly little, or surprisingly a lot. (Can you tell we make good consultants?) It depends on whether you do baby steps or go whole hog. You can make a home network based on the existing wiring in the walls or using the airwaves in your house, with wireless options. No cost for infrastructure there. Is it as powerful as an installed system? No, but for many it will do the trick. Alternatively, you can install a whole system from scratch. The cost varies, just like the cost of building a house. The more you put in, the more it costs. We’ve used both approaches, wired and wireless. We put investment upfront into our transport layer — the wiring and connectivity in the walls — and less on the things we connect to that layer, to give us more flexibility as things change. For instance, at Danny’s house in Maine, rather than design for a big 32” TV, he left the living room unfinished because he knew that the price of flat-screen plasma TVs would plummet. He waited patiently for prices to drop. He’s still waiting. So is his wife. Table 1-1 shows you some of the rough costs for getting into a smart home, with reasonable expectations set forth in this book. These are the costs of the components and the installation — you’ll have some additional ongoing costs for services such as Internet and cable TV and for your computing hardware.
Slide 43: Chapter 1: Mi Casa, Cool Casa Table 1-1 Expense Area Wired infrastructure Wireless infrastructure Home theater (TV + surround) Whole-home audio Phone system Intercom system (standalone) Data system Security system Home automation 21 The Cost of It All! Low $1000 $50 $1000 $1000 $150 $100 $50 $200 $50 Midrange $2500 $150 $3000 $2000 $500 $500 $150 $500 $1000 High $4000 $200 $25,000 $6000 $1000 $1000 $500 $2000 $10,000 Obscene $6000 $500 $200,000 $30,000 $2000 $2000 $1500 $20,000 $30,000 Total $3600 $10,300 $49,700 $292,000 In this book, you’ll go through the following process of thinking smartly: 1. Finding out all you can about your options 2. Putting your thoughts on paper 3. Figuring out the costs of your desired options 4. Refining your thoughts based on cost 5. Getting help where needed 6. Installing the systems in a methodical and somewhat structured process 7. Adding all the cool devices that put your smart home to use 8. Sitting back and enjoying yourself. (We’d like to stress this one, but the reality is that you’ll enjoy your smart home for a moment and then go back to the first step and start over, because you’ll want more.) We provide detailed steps as well as more budgeting information in Chapter 4.
Slide 44: 22 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes
Slide 45: Chapter 2 Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking In This Chapter Turning on to whole-home networking Hiding ugly cables and components Designing a space for entertainment equipment Looking at all-in-one cabling solutions Finding the perfect rack s you think about your home network, think in terms of the big picture. Instead of talking about how to link one computer to another, think about a computer network that extends to every room. Instead of trying to extend your cable TV signal from one room to another, think about a videodistribution strategy for the whole house. Instead of discussing your homeentertainment center, map out a media backbone for your entire home. In this chapter, you look at networks in a broad, whole-home sense. We tell you how all the networks in your home fit together physically and how you can make home networking easier by designing a central location (or two) to house all of your networking equipment. We also discuss some structured cabling solutions, which are packages of bundled cabling and distribution panels that can take care of most home-networking infrastructure needs in one easy-to-buy-and-install single-vendor system. A All Together Now! Your home infrastructure may consist of one or more of the following networks: A phone network A data network (often called a local area network, or LAN)
Slide 46: 24 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes An electrical network A security network An intercom network (may be part of your phone network) An entertainment network A home-automation and -control capability that allows your house to do common tasks on its own Access to the Internet and other external programming sources (such as satellite broadcasts, cable, and telephone services) Now, you may not want or need all these different types of networks in your home. However, if you’re at a point in the construction or remodeling of your home where running cables is easy, consider providing the cables so that you (or someone who owns your home after you) can add these capabilities later. We’re not implying that you physically need to wire each of these networks separately. When we wrote the first edition of this book, lots of vendors of security, intercom, phone, home-control, and other network gear had their own proprietary wiring that they required you to install if you didn’t want to void the warranty on the gear. Well, the market voted with their pocketbooks and started buying nonproprietary solutions, and the explosion of broadband and home networking is pushing standards across the whole home — in the form of Internet protocol, or IP, networking. With applications in the home converging on IP networking, wiring your home is easier. In fact, for most applications, you need to use only one type of cabling: twisted-pair cabling. That solution is so much better than running lots of proprietary cables around the house. Believe us. One of the difficulties when thinking about home networking is that different networks sometimes do the same thing. To simplify, you can think of your home network in three ways: Physical configuration: The cables, connections, and specific pieces of equipment that make up the physical aspects of your network. This is where all the detail work comes in. Logical configuration: Each network is viewed as a single object (such as a phone network) or as a model. Most of the networks we discuss in this book use a star model, in which all the cables meet at a single junction point, just as the spokes of a wheel meet at the hub. Applications: The network’s purpose, or application, and connections. Your entertainment network, for example, may represent a combination of different physical components and logical entities aimed at distributing audio and video around your house. A typical system might include audio and video devices such as a video switch (often part of your home theater receiver), gaming consoles and DVD players, a broadcast satellite that runs to receivers that require phone line access, and homemanagement software to control the network’s functionality.
Slide 47: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking Although it’s easiest to discuss the building of home networks by talking about the cables and connectors (as we do throughout the book), the beginning phases of conceptualizing a home network start from the opposite end. You usually begin by thinking of what you want to accomplish (the applications), move on to considering each individual network and its layout (the logical configuration), and then get to the nitty-gritty of cables, connectors, and specific hardware components (the physical configuration). Thinking of networks by application, logically, and physically can reveal ways to save money, time, and headaches. For example, if you think strictly in terms of the phone network and data network being logically different networks, you could overlook that these networks may be able to transmit over the same in-wall cables. As mentioned, we’re getting closer to the time when homeowners will be able to install an integrated, unified network that carries voice, video, data, audio, and home-control signals over a single kind of cabling infrastructure. When that day comes, we’ll write a really short version of Smart Homes For Dummies and spend more time on the golf course or basketball court. Unfortunately (for Pat’s jump shot and Danny’s swing), that day is still quite a ways off. Today’s home network still consists of a number of independent networks, each doing its own thing over its own set of wires and cables. That’s not to say that there aren’t places where today’s individual home networks come together and work together. A typical house has a whole bunch of network interconnection points, making these separate networks behave somewhat like a unified, single network. Networks can physically interconnect in a home in three ways: Networks can share the same media (or cables) to carry different kinds of signals. For example, telephone wiring might be used to carry both telephone service and data networking at different frequencies using a phone-line networking system. Another example: The IP (Internet Protocol) allows many disparate types of signals — voice, data, video, and so on — to peacefully coexist in the same data stream running over common data-networking wiring. Specific devices can connect to multiple networks. A DSS satellite receiver, for example, connects to both video and telephone networks. A media server such as a PVR could connect to your video network and your data network. Incoming service provider feeds can carry multiple services and connect to different networks in the home. For example, a cable company might provide television, Internet access, and telephone service over three different home networks. 25
Slide 48: 26 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Moving Your Network into the Closet When integrating a home network in your home design or remodeling plans, the following two points are key: Designate an appropriate location for all your network’s central distribution equipment. Make sure that you have an adequate quality and quantity of network cabling running to each potential network outlet in your home. Wireless disclaimer: It’s tempting to believe everything you read about how wireless is going to make wired networks in the home redundant. We wish this were true. We’re enamored with the promise of meshed high bandwidth wireless that connects everything in the home under one power of unwired Zen. Unfortunately, we’re still a long ways away from this, and every time we think we’re getting close, new applications and requirements come along that make the wireless options inadequate or unreliable — for example, just as soon as Wi-Fi got fast enough to support television, high-definition television came along and blew that proposition out the window. So while we wait for wireless to fulfill its promise, we recommend an environment that consists of a wired backbone with wireless endpoints, to provide whole-home wired and wireless support. You can’t lose in that environment. In this section, we discuss the first of these points — designing a central location for your network components. In the following section, we discuss the pieces and parts — the cables and connectors that make up the physical network. Talk to your builder or remodeler about designating a space as a central wiring closet. (For a remodel, it often makes sense to have multiple locations.) The wiring closet should be out of sight but easily accessible, with plenty of space and adequate power to run a great deal of equipment. By designating a central wiring closet, you gain the following benefits: Hidden wires: The walls of a truly wired home contain lots of cables: wires for a phone network, a video network, an audio network, a computer network, a security network, and a remote-control network. Add the connections to the outside phone lines, cable TV, and satellite feeds, and it can quickly become a bowl of spaghetti. You don’t want to have to tuck these wires behind your furniture. In a wiring closet, these cables are neatly terminated in a series of wiring panels.
Slide 49: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking Hidden hardware: Much of the hardware that facilitates home networking, such as distribution panels and punchdown blocks (these panels and blocks are special wiring-termination devices that connect all the cables running to remote locations in your house), is designed for function rather than form. A central wiring closet puts this hardware out of view. Single point of connection: Most networks we describe in this book connect to the outside world at a single, central location. Why not have the wires of all these networks terminate in the same area to make it easier to do things such as connect your Internet line to your computer network? Easy access: When you want to change the capabilities of your networks or troubleshoot a problem, having everything neatly arranged and easily accessible can eliminate a source of frustration. Larger homes might have more than one wiring closet. In the simpler olden days of smart home yore, the massive expense of components and the lack of peer-to-peer communications technologies forced a smart home owner to consolidate things in one place. This situation is beginning to change. With a strong networking backbone in the home, and the right architecture and design for that backbone (we’ve got your back here), devices and applications can hop on and off at will. This allows you to distribute (or cluster) groups of equipment around the home. Danny, for instance, has a main wiring closet in his basement where his satellite receiver, cable modem, telephone, security, and main power connections are consolidated into a Leviton smart wiring panel. But he also has subpanels set up in the back of his main home office, where more specialized forms of equipment for networking, e-mail, wireless connections, backup drives, and such are found, and another in his third-floor entertainment area, again anchored by another Leviton wiring panel, where the audio, video, data, telephone, security, and home-automation equipment is located. All three are interconnected to take advantage of the functionality in the other places, in a whole-home fashion. 27 The contents of your wiring closet Most of the cabling and infrastructure components of a home’s networks should be installed in the area of your home designated as your wiring closet. A few items — mainly parts of your home-entertainment network — are better located in complementary wiring closets elsewhere (we get to the concept of a media center later in this chapter). In addition, a few systems in a home network are inherently decentralized, such as home-control components, security systems, and wireless phone or data network systems. These
Slide 50: 28 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes devices don’t necessarily have central control units, or they have control units that should be out in the open and readily accessible, not hidden away in a wiring closet. The devices that should go in a central wiring closet include The coaxial video-distribution panel (see Chapter 6) Patch panels for CAT-5e/6 rated phone and data wiring (see Chapter 11) Central controllers (called ATAs) for VoIP telephone systems (see Chapter 10) Cable, satellite, and DSL modems and routers (see Chapter 13) Ethernet switches (see Chapter 15) Stand-alone home-automation control units (see Chapter 19) You can also put home servers and some of your central media equipment in the wiring closet if you don’t need to physically access them frequently and you need the extra space elsewhere. Some of your wireless (Wi-Fi) capability may be here as well, depending on its location relative to the structure of your home. More on these centralized devices later in the chapter. Some cable and DSL modems utilize a USB instead of an Ethernet interface. This simplifies connecting one of these modems to a single computer, but it makes it just about impossible to directly connect it to a centralized LAN hub. If your service provider leases or sells you one of these modems, it must be installed next to a server computer in your home office or other location. Most providers give you the choice of USB or Ethernet, but the offer may not be advertised. So ask the question upfront, and ask for an Ethernet modem. If you are building a new house, take a lot of pictures after the wiring is roughed in. Then, if you need to cut a hole in a wall later on (say, for a new cabinet), you’ll know what’s behind it. The location of your wiring closet In the best-case scenario, you can create a dedicated room for your networking equipment — a central wiring closet just like those in modern offices and other commercial buildings. If we were starting a home from scratch, we’d design the wiring closet as follows: On the main floor of the house. Near an outside wall for easy interconnection to incoming service feeds. Above an accessible part of the basement (if we have a basement).
Slide 51: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking With adequate lighting, ventilation, and climate protection (not in the garage, in other words). Electronic gear generates heat, so if you live south of the Arctic Circle, it’s a good idea to have air-conditioning vents in the wiring closet. With adequate AC power-line receptacles to power devices such as video amplifiers, Ethernet hubs, and VoIP phone systems. Such a closet needn’t be too large — something between a standard coat closet and a small walk-in closet. A lot of your gear will go in a wall-mounted structured wiring system — what most manufacturers call the panel. Some, however, might go on shelving or in a rack. A typical rack has a 2-by-2-foot footprint. Of course, the vast majority of home builders or remodelers don’t have the luxury of adding this kind of dedicated space for a network wiring closet. In these cases, some other part of the house has to do double duty as your wiring closet. Here are some locations to consider: The utility room or laundry room: The biggest disadvantage of this location is the potential for high humidity, so make sure your clothes dryer is well ventilated to the outdoors. (And take steps to keep all the dryer lint from building up on your equipment!) A protected garage: The potential for dust and extreme temperatures may make this location less than optimal for some homes. The basement: A basement can be a good location because it’s easy to run wires through a drop ceiling, but keep in mind that basements can be both dusty and damp. A weather-protected outdoor closet: This location is a last resort, but it could be acceptable if you live in a mild climate. However, we don’t recommend putting any active electronics, such as Ethernet hubs or phone systems, out here. The natural enemies of electrical and electronic equipment are moisture, dust, and temperature extremes, so locations that may work for someone in Florida or California may not make sense for those in North Dakota or Arizona. 29 Feeding Audio and Video from the Media Center Most network systems in your house — specifically, the data wiring, phone wiring, and coaxial video-distribution wiring — are best located in a wiring closet. The parts of your network that provide the audio and video signals that you send through your house, however, are more appropriately centralized in the room where you use them the most. We call this area the media center.
Slide 52: 30 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes For most people, the media center is also their home theater, the place where the fancy surround-sound audio receiver, the biggest and best TV monitor, and the handcrafted, wood-veneered, titanium-woofer speakers all live. The contents of your media center Chances are, you want to be able to quickly access your CD/DVD player (unless it’s one of those DVD jukeboxes that holds 200 DVD/CDs or an MP3 home server) and your video source equipment (such as the VCR and DVD player) to change discs or tapes and for local (in-room) listening and viewing. So it makes sense to locate your audio network and the source equipment for your video network in a different place than the rest of your wiring closet. We like to call this location the media center, but if that sounds a bit too much like CNN Central in Atlanta, you can call it the “room with all the fun toys.” What goes into a media center? All your audio and video equipment: Video source devices: set-top boxes, VCRs, DVDs, PVRs, and laserdisc players — and Internet-based devices such as an Apple TV (see Chapter 7) Audio source devices: CD players, MP3 players such as iPods, radio tuners, satellite radio receivers such as XM or Sirius, and turntables (see Chapter 8) Audio amplifiers and controllers for your whole-home audio system (see Chapter 8) Impedance-matching panels for audio amplifiers (see Chapter 8) Connecting blocks and emitters from your IR control network or centralized controller panels for a CAT-5e/6 audio/video controller system (see Chapter 19) Your main video-distribution panel doesn’t go in the media center — just the source equipment and a modulator or other distribution device that can distribute signals back over your two-way coaxial or other cabling network (such as a CAT-5e/6 video distribution system) to the panel in the wiring closet. In addition to the audio/video equipment that you’re distributing across your network, you want to have all the stuff needed to do local listening and viewing in your media center. In other words, a television or video monitor, speakers, and a surround-sound receiver or a controller/amplifier system should also be in this room.
Slide 53: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking 31 Other central hubs With the explosion of PCs and other computing gear in the home, you might want to create a computing epicenter around which you’ll gather your key centralized computing devices. Your home server might go here, as well as specialized backup gear, switching for local multiple PCs, special audio gear for these PCs, and more. For instance, Danny’s attic has four PCs for multiplayer gaming, and he uses a local hub to optimize the communications among these four machines while efficiently linking to the central hub in the basement as well as to the Media Center hub. You can create a localized hub just about anywhere in your home where you’ll have a big concentration of networked gear. Most manufacturers of home cabling systems (discussed in the “Makers of all-in-one systems” section) offer smaller versions of their panels and other gear designed for such applications. Remember, you don’t have to subdivide your wiring, but if you have specialized needs (like Danny’s computer lab) you might want to. Setting up your media center Locating all this gear and related wiring discreetly in your media center can be a bit problematic. This room, unlike a wiring closet, is a public space in your house, not necessarily a place where you can hide unsightly bundles of wire and racks of equipment. So your aesthetic requirements will be a bit higher. The best solution is to design the room with an enclosed equipment-andconnection area. This is where you would put your whole-home equipment — the equipment that you don’t need to access to watch a program or listen to something — such as impedance-matching equipment and modulators. Your equipment-and-connection area could be a well-ventilated closet. We’ve seen sophisticated setups with a false wall behind the TV and equipment racks to allow access to the backs of all of the gear. If you can’t find a separate space for your whole-home equipment, you can connect all your outgoing speaker wires and IR or CAT-5e/6 control cables to wall outlets behind your equipment rack, and then use short cables to connect these outlets to the equipment itself. If you can’t find an aesthetically pleasing way of getting all this stuff in your media center, you might consider putting the audio-amplification and impedance-matching equipment in your wiring closet (along with your whole-house speaker wire connections). Use the shortest run possible of high-quality, shielded audio interconnects to connect these amps to the audio source equipment back in your media center.
Slide 54: 32 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Fiber-optic faux pas? Perhaps you’ve been skipping around the book, reading up on the stuff that goes into all the different networks in a home, and you’ve been scratching your head and wondering why you can’t find any mention about installing fiberoptic cabling in the home. Well . . . we didn’t forget about it. We don’t recommend installing fiber in the home, mainly because somewhere around zero applications for fiber are available among all the thousands of consumer electronics devices sold today. The only place that fiber ever comes into play is for some specialized digital audio interconnects, the kind used to connect CD and DVD players to external digital-to-analog converters (such as the ones inside fancy home-theater receivers). But isn’t fiber the future — and isn’t this book all about taking a long-term view? The answers to those questions are “Yes” and “Yes, but . . .” Someday, fiber-optic cable may be the most common cabling for connecting home audio, video, data, and phone networks. We do recommend that you give yourself a head start by designing your home in such a way that adding new cable types such as fiber will be easier when the time comes. But for now, we think that running fiber in a home is a waste of time and money. Choosing Cables After electrical wiring, telephone-type wiring (called twisted pair) is the most common type of wire in home networks. This category of cabling does more than just carry telephone signals. Twisted-pair cabling is the basis of most computer LANs and can be used to carry other data, such as audio and video signals, in your home network. (The wires are twisted inside a sheath — you can’t see the twisting except to note slight bumps at regular intervals in the cabling.) The wiring in modern phone and LAN systems is twisted for a reason (besides the fact that colored wires woven together look pretty). Through some magical properties of physics, the interweaving of the wires protects against electrical interference. No interference means no cross talk, which occurs when, for example, the fax transmission on line one bleeds through to the voice call on line two. You usually find twisted-pair phone and data wiring in a cable jacket that has no electrical shielding. Those in the know refer to it as UTP, or unshielded twisted pair. Older homes were usually wired with quad cable, a flat, untwisted cable that contains two pairs of wires, sufficient for carrying two phone lines. This type
Slide 55: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking of wiring is much more susceptible to interference and cross talk and is illsuited for modern, high-speed communications and networking. If you currently have quad cable, our advice is to replace it. Newer homes are generally wired for telephone service with a round cable (usually in a gray jacket) that contains two twisted pairs of wires (four conductors). This cabling is much less prone to interference problems, and most types can carry up to two POTS or ISDN phone lines (described in more detail in Chapter 10) in their native mode. In general, this type of cable is not adequate for truly high-speed data networks but is perfectly adequate for distributing telephone and low-speed analog data service throughout your house. Although these cables are just fine for telephone service, they might not support the most sophisticated phone systems, such as a VoIP PBX or a digital key phone system. In these cases, you’ll want to use CAT-5e/6 cabling (which we discuss in the next section) rather than your old phone wires. 33 Cable categories UTP cables are rated by their category, or the measure of the cable’s bandwidth capacity, as shown in Table 2-1. Higher-rated cables can handle higherspeed data networks. Rated cables are usually referred to as CAT-x, where x is the category rating. For example, Category 5e cable is CAT-5e. Table 2-1 Cable Rating Category 1 Category 2 Category 3 Category 4 Category 5 Category 5e Category 6 Category Ratings of UTP Cabling Performance Rating No performance criteria Rated to 1 MHz (used for telephone wiring) Rated to 16 MHz (used for Ethernet 10BaseT) Rated to 20 MHz (used for 10BaseT) Rated to 100 MHz (used for 100BaseT, 10BaseT) Rated to100 MHz (used for 1000 BaseT, 100BaseT, 10BaseT) Rated to100 MHz (used for 1000 BaseT, 100BaseT, 10BaseT) As a baseline for any “smart home” we recommend that you choose Category 5e (CAT-5e) or Category-6 (CAT-6) UTP data-grade wiring. This wire doesn’t cost much more than the nonrated variety, and it’s better suited to the highspeed technologies that your phone lines may carry, such as digital subscriber
Slide 56: 34 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes line (DSL) data connections (see Chapter 13 for more about DSL). CAT-5e and CAT-6, the highest-rated UTP cabling systems generally available on the market as we write, can carry Fast and Gigabit Ethernet networks capable of data rates of 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps, respectively. This cable can also handle anything a lower-rated UTP cable does, such as carrying telephone signals. As we write this book, CAT-5e is being supplanted by CAT-6 in the marketplace, but for your typical home applications either one will do. Smart people use nothing less than CAT-5e/6 in their homes — even if they are only running a regular phone line. Don’t go cheap and get CAT-3 or another lesser-grade wiring. If you peruse the brochures and Web sites of cable manufacturers and resellers, you may run across someone who is selling UTP cables that appear to have a higher rating than CAT-5e or CAT-6. Some cable manufacturers are selling proprietary CAT-7 cabling systems that promise even greater performance. These higher-rated cables may indeed be capable of carrying even higher-speed networks than CAT-6, but right now no standard ensures that one company’s CAT-7 — or whatever they may call it — will carry the same amount of data as another company’s. A final comment: Although your house has other cables, especially the RG-6 cabling we discuss in Chapters 6 and 7, UTP cabling gets most of the attention because there are so many types and because the trend in home-networking circles is to use CAT-5e/6 for just about everything. As the Ethernet and IP protocols continue to penetrate the home, more and more applications will ride on this CAT-5e/6 backbone. Other forms of cabling have different classes and performance characteristics but are more application specific. Coaxial cabling, for instance, is used by many telephone companies to route video around the home. We discuss these cables in turn in their respective sections in this book. While the trend is to use more UTP telephone/data cabling for everything in your home, we’re still far from that. Here are some ideas about other cabling you’ll need to complete your home networking layout: Coaxial cabling: This is the cabling used for TV antennas, cable TV, and satellite TV. The two most common types of cabling are RG-6 and RG-59, with RG-59 being the lesser grade. We recommend RG-6 throughout the house to maximize your options. RG-59 is typically used for very short connections, such as from your VCR to your TV. Security cabling: Most security (alarm) systems use their own special cabling to connect sensors back to the alarm panel. We discuss this cabling in Chapter 18. Audio speaker cabling: We’ll get into the specifics of all sorts of audio cables in Chapter 9, but when you are putting audio cabling in the walls, look to use at least 16 gauge speaker wires rated for in-wall usage.
Slide 57: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking 35 The NID When you’re talking telephone cabling, you might hear someone mention NID (network interface device), SID (service interface device), or some other similar term. A network interface device is a small plastic box that serves as the point of demarcation between your home’s telephone networks and your service provider’s network. Incoming phone lines connect to one side of the NID, terminating within a locked portion of the box (only the phone company’s techs are allowed in there). This side of the NID is electrically connected to the consumer side of the NID, where your internal phone wiring begins. The NID is part of a standard telephone-company line installation. Its demarcation function makes the NID a significant part of a phone network. Everything on the telephone company’s side of the NID (all the way back to their central telephone-switching office) is their responsibility to maintain and repair. The consumer side of the NID is your inside wiring, and if something goes awry, you pay for its repair. Many local telephone companies offer inexpensive inside-wiring-repair policies that they tack onto your phone bill every month. If something goes wrong with your inside wiring, the phone company sends someone out to troubleshoot and repair the problem for free. This service can be a good deal if you have an older house. As cable and telephone companies bundle more services, this clean demarcation is going away because they are managing more things inside the home, such as the cabling for Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) and wireless/wireline combined products. Patch me in! The many cables that run through your house can be a big mess when you get to the point where you want to hook them up with the telephone company, the cable company, or something else. Fortunately, you can use a patch panel (also called a terminal block or punchdown block) to neatly patch together telephone, data, security and other application lines. A patch panel is a wall-mounted piece of equipment that serves as a junction point for lines. Inbound lines from various outside-of-house sources are connected to terminals in the patch panel. For instance, you connect telephone lines from your NID into one side of the patch panel. Then, all your in-home distribution lines are connected to another set of terminals. To connect a particular in-house line to your home telephone line, for instance, you would “patch” the two terminals with — you guessed it — a patch cable, a process known as bridging, or cross-connecting. For video cable wiring (typically RG-6 coaxial cable), the patch panel is usually called a distribution hub. But the principles are the same: lines in and lines out. We discuss distribution hubs in detail in Chapter 6.
Slide 58: 36 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Patch panels come in all sorts of styles. If you purchase one of the modular distribution systems we discuss later in this chapter, you are likely to have an RJ-11, RJ-45, F-connector or other common cable plug. This makes it easy for you to cross link your sources with your destinations. Some ports on your patch panel may support combinations of lines. For instance, if you have four telephone lines coming into your home, you might have one jack that you can plug a patch cable into a jack that combines all four pairs in one eightconductor connection. Note that you’ll hear us discuss home runs throughout the book. This means that the cable is run directly from the remote jack back to this centrally homed location. You can get patch panels for lots of varied cables or ones for a specific type of cable (say for telephone or data applications). Depending on your installer and how much you want to spend, a patch panel can have the following interfaces: Pole and nut terminal interfaces: You unscrew the nut, put the wire in, and screw the nut back in. Port interfaces: You plug the individual runs of phone wire directly into modular jacks, or screw your F-connector from your coax into a female F-connector endpoint. Punchdown interface: You push the wire into the receptacles by using a punchdown tool. This tool simultaneously strips the wire of its insulation and connects the wire electrically to the panel. Some patch panels could have combinations of the preceding. Figure 2-1 shows a Leviton patch panel with RJ-11, RJ-45, and F-connectors. CAT-5e/6 cable can be used for many things (such as phones, computer networks, and audio/video networks). We — and just about everyone else in the home-networking world — recommend that you run at least two CAT-5e/6 cables to every significant room in your house (every place but bathrooms and closets). This setup gives you flexibility because each cable can be reconnected to different networks back at the patch panel. So a cable that today provides extra voice outlets in a bedroom can be reconfigured to connect to your data LAN by simply changing the termination of the cable in your panel from the phone network to the data network. Unlike the main network UTP cabling, which you buy in bulk and run inside your walls, patch cables are usually purchased in precut lengths (of a few feet) with the connectors already attached. If you use a structured prewiring system, such as those offered by Leviton (www.leviton.com), the patch panels and distribution panels are housed in the central wiring hub. These wiring hubs are modular, so you can easily add patch panels or distribution panels as you expand your network. We talk more about these systems shortly.
Slide 59: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking 37 Figure 2-1: A patch panel dramatically neatens up your wiring hub.
Slide 60: 38 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Jacks and plugs for everyone For the past 30 years or so, telephone and coaxial cable wires have been using standardized connectors — plugs and jacks — to connect equipment to the wiring infrastructure. For UTP cables, these modular connectors come in three physical variants, which look basically the same but come in different widths to accommodate more wires (or positions): Four-position jack and plug: Connects handsets to telephones. Six-position jack and plug: Handles one, two, or three lines, which means that two, four, or six wires, respectively, terminate in the jack. Most of these jacks on our phones have only four wires used in the six positions, but you can see six positions if you look closely. Eight-position jack and plugs: Used for data applications such as Ethernet and other computer LANs; not normally used for phones. Businesses sometime use 25-pair jack and plugs as well, but you’re not likely to need or see these in your house. We recommend that you use eight-position jacks — not six — throughout your home so that the jacks can be used for voice or data or whatever. Most consumer phone equipment, whether it be one-, two-, or three-line capable, can use RJ-45 outlets for these RJ-11 standard connectors. Beyond physical size, the communications industry also differentiates jacks by their configuration (how many wires are connected to them). You may see documentation referring to jacks and plugs as RJ-11: Two wires connected for a single-line connection RJ-14: Four wires connected for a two-line connection RJ-25: Six wires connected for a three-line connection RJ-45: Eight wires connected for data LAN (wider than phone jacks) The RJ-45 jack/plug is the one you will use for most smart home applications such as computer networks (LANs), Voice over IP (VoIP) phones, Ethernetbased audio- and video-distribution systems, and remote-control keypads for your audio/video system. You can also plug phones (with their smaller RJ-11 or RJ-14 jacks) into an RJ-45 outlet. Security systems use a special kind of RJ jack called the RJ-31X. We talk about this jack in Part V, which covers home-security systems. All of this “RJ-this” and “RJ-that” talk quickly gets confusing. Even the experts get confused because an RJ-11 can mean different things, depending on whether you’re following an old Bell Telephone standard, a Telecommunications
Slide 61: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking Industry Association (TIA) standard, or something else. We usually refer to sixposition phone jacks as RJ-11s, regardless of how many wires are connected, and eight-position jacks as RJ-45s. That’s the way most people talk, regardless of what the standards say. Like all cable connectors, RJ-connectors come in both male and female varieties. We leave the reasons for naming each variety to your own imagination, but we will tell you that you find the male version of the connector on the end of a cable and the female connector on wall outlets or inside equipment such as your PC. You’ll also run into some similar video-cable options — there are cable connectors, but far fewer of them, and we discuss those in Chapter 6. 39 Modular wall outlets The endpoints of your telephone network are the wall outlets in each room. These wall plates have holes that are populated with modular connections corresponding to what you want to terminate — such as a phone, data, or cable connection. Although you can find wall plates equipped with RJ-11 modular jacks (and you can plug any of your old telephone equipment into these), RJ-11 jacks are not going to be much good if you want to change the use of the outlets. We recommend that you install RJ-45 outlets everywhere — remember that your standard RJ-11 modular phone connectors will work fine in them. Accessorize your phone network A range of small, useful accessories are handy with your home-wiring network, including the following: 1-to-2 splitter jack: This jack takes a single RJ-14 or RJ-45 connection (which has two pairs of wire) and splits it into two singlepair RJ-11 or RJ-45 connections so that you can connect two devices. 2-jack modular adapter: This adapter takes a single RJ-14 or RJ-45 connection and splits it into two RJ-14 or RJ-45 connections, allowing you to have two two-line phones sharing the same wall jack, for instance. You can readily find three- and five-jack versions as well. Inline coupler: This accessory connects two four-wire phone cords, which is great when you have to run an extra-long distance across the room. For example, you can use an inline coupler to connect two six-foot telephone cords to get one twelvefoot cord. These gadgets offer more flexibility when you find that your wired network doesn’t quite give you exactly what you want. Grab a handful and keep them in your toolbox — you’ll need them.
Slide 62: 40 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes When you’re choosing phone wall outlets for a room, consider what other home-network outlets you’ll need in the same location. You can find many modular outlets that take up a double- or triple-gang-sized junction box (a single gang, which we talk about in Chapter 7, is the size of a standard light switch or wall outlet) and allow you to connect data and video networks all in one large outlet. Investigating All-in-One Wiring Solutions We believe that most homeowners want to install a home network that can handle, at a minimum, the three main types of network applications: telephone, data, and video. Most major wiring and network infrastructure vendors believe this, too, and offer all-in-one structured cabling systems. With these systems, a single vendor supplies (and in many cases, installs) a complete, integrated home-networking infrastructure. Structured cabling systems Most structured cabling systems for the home are offshoots of similar (and more complicated) packages of hardware and wiring that networking system vendors have been offering their corporate customers for years. The concept is simple: go to the vendor, tell them your requirements, and get an off-theshelf, soup-to-nuts system ready for installation. For the most part, structured cabling systems are made up of the same parts that you’d use if you were building separate home networks by yourself. Specifically, you’ll find that most contain the following components: A service center: Combines phone and data patch panels and a video distribution center in a single unit — making for a neater installation. Service centers are usually modular, wall-mounted components. All-in-one cables: Cabling that combines telephone and data cabling and coaxial cable for video in a single cable jacket. Some systems even include fiber-optic cables in the same jacket. (See the “Fiber-optic faux pas?” sidebar for our opinion on the matter.) Customized wall outlet plates: Matched up with the all-in-one cable, these faceplates provide modular connectors for your phone, data, and video outlets. As you can see, nothing about these systems is different than the pieces you’d install if you were designing your own home networks. They’re simply put together in one big kit to facilitate buying, designing, and installing your network infrastructure.
Slide 63: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking 41 Where all-in-one systems work (and don’t work) If you read the product literature from most manufacturers (we tell you where to find it in just a moment), you get the impression that a structured cabling system can do everything but clean the kitchen sink. However, some of the capabilities and applications listed for these systems are based on forwardlooking marketing projections rather than on what you can actually do now. We mention this not to disparage the structured cabling system but to warn you that installing one may not take care of all your home-networking needs. For example, the following applications are usually not easily supported by most structured systems: Alarm systems: Although some security features, such as security cameras, can fit in a structured cabling system, a full-featured, monitored, hardwired security system requires its own wiring — usually installed by a registered professional installer. Structured wiring systems allow you to interface the alarm to an outgoing telephone system for monitoring. Whole-home multizone hi-fi audio: You can add components to your structured wiring system to distribute single-zone audio throughout your home (meaning everyone hears the same thing everywhere), but many don’t include the speaker wiring and distribution systems to get hi-fi multizone audio around your home (which allows you to send different audio sources to different parts of the house simultaneously). So, you’re probably thinking, what do these systems support? Quite a lot, actually. At a bare minimum, a structured cabling system should provide: A flexible telephone network using high-quality, unshielded twistedpair (UTP) phone cabling and a modular, configurable termination system at the service center. A computer network of CAT-5e/6 UTP cabling for data networking. A centrally distributed coaxial cable (usually RG6) network for distributing video signals. An all-in-one modular termination panel to neatly terminate all this network wiring in your wiring closet. You’ll find structured systems capable of handling additional applications such as alarms, hi-fi audio, and infrared networking as standards supporting such connections become popular.
Slide 64: 42 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Makers of all-in-one systems Just about every company that specializes in network cabling offers a residential structured cabling system. Those that don’t are sure to begin soon. Keeping in mind the fact that this is a growing marketplace, here’s a list of some of the major vendors and their Web pages: ChannelPlus: www.channelplus.com Elk Products: www.elkproducts.com GE Smart: http://www.geindustrial.com/cwc/products? id=il-pmsw Honeywell FutureSmart: www.futuresmart.com Hubbel netSELECT: http://www.hubbellpremise.com/homenetworking.asp Leviton: www.leviton.com Monster Cable Products: www.monstercable.com On-Q/Legrand: www.onqlegrand.com Unicom: www.unicomlink.com USTec: www.ustecnet.com Hints for Designing a Futureproofed Home Here’s a collection of some of our best tips for your home adventure: Anticipate your needs: You need to think, think, think when planning your home network. A smart home is only as good as your design. And it will cost you a bundle to add something later that you forgot. We know it’s hard — you never know where you’re going to end up. (Ask Danny, he has two sets of twins.) Read everything: Different publications and books have different perspectives and goals, and they each add a different aspect to your planning. So, read . . . a lot. Overdo it: You start working at home and need a home office. So does your spouse. You have more kids. You need more computers. You add a wing to the house. Running the bare minimum of wires only to rooms
Slide 65: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking that you’re sure will need them is not always enough. We admit that we overbuilt our houses. There, we said it. We overbuilt. Why? Because we believe in futureproofing our homes. Can you get by with other options? Yes. Can you add later? Yes, at more cost. Is it easier to do it up front? Oh yes! So overdo it. Run that extra wire. Leave room for expansion: No matter how much you believe that you’ll think of everything upfront, you won’t. Plan for expansion. If you have a choice of two models, and one is slightly larger, go with the larger one. Will this add cost up front? Absolutely — but it will save you money down the road. Run conduits: Think about access and flexibility for future growth when you run your wires. You never know when you’re going to have to run more cable for some reason or another. Run PVC conduits between floors and in the walls, instead of just running wire, so you can add more cable in the future if you need to. Be cognizant of elbows in these PVC runs — cable, especially thicker cable, does not travel well around corners. Figure 2-2 shows how this might work. Leave pull cords in the conduit. (Pull cords are cords that you use to pull cables through that conduit.) Also be careful about what you run in the same conduit — some signals running inside cables can interfere with each other. Never run electrical wiring inside these PVC conduits no matter how much money it saves you. If you’re planning on blowing foam insulation into your house, running conduits is even more critical. Most foam insulation is blown into the wall space after the wiring is completed, so you don’t get a lot of second chances if you don’t run PVC. Stud wall (before drywall) 43 Empty conduit Figure 2-2: Running PVC pipe in the wall.
Slide 66: 44 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Don’t forget the power: Nothing’s worse than buying the latest and greatest telephone, bringing it home, plugging the telephone cable in, and then realizing there’s no electrical outlet anywhere nearby. Argh! When you renovate your house or build your new home, you need to talk to your electrician and cabling contractor about the location of electrical outlets. Most electrical outlets are installed every so many feet along the wall (per electrical regulations) and aren’t coordinated with your phone lines or other smart devices. In areas that will have lots of electronic gear, such as the home office or home theater, have your electrician run dedicated circuits. There’s nothing worse than finding out — a month after you’ve finished your network — that plugging the vacuum cleaner into that outlet in the foyer knocks out the circuit breaker in your home office because the electrician put them on the same circuit. Don’t get fooled by all-in-one, all the time: A big theme in home networking, particularly home automation, is to find a single solution that does everything. True, integration is good and something to look at seriously. But all-in-one solutions are also sometimes the lowest common denominator. Hard-core stereo buffs tend to go with the best-of-breed approach. They buy a tuner from one manufacturer, a CD/DVD player from another, and an amplifier from yet another for a reason: The individual elements have enough to offer on their own to make the hassle of interconnecting them worthwhile. So look at individual options as well as overall solutions in your buying process. Be creative: Planning a smart home is an opportunity to have fun and be creative. The infrastructure you put in place will enable the fun stuff, but it won’t create it. Only by hanging neat technologies off the endpoints of that infrastructure will you see the fruits of your efforts. You’re creating an investment. When you go to sell your home, its unique attributes will provide value for the buyer. Racking It Up Some things about your smart home you won’t appreciate fully until you use them over and over. Equipment racks are like that — they sound metallic and boring, but you will be oh so glad you bought one. An equipment rack complements your wiring hub. The structured wiring solutions we discuss in this book give you a means to manage all the wires coming in to, out of, and around your house. However, wiring panels can house only a few very small pieces of networking gear, such as routers or switches — these panels were not made to house a DirecTV receiver or a home server or other large devices.
Slide 67: Chapter 2: Zen and the Art of Whole-Home Networking That chore falls to an equipment rack. If you’ve ever seen a computer room or a high-end home theater, you’ve probably seen a vertical bank of computers and other gear housed in an equipment rack. The boom of home entertainment has presented an opportunity for equipment rack vendors to enter the consumer space with racking options for residential use. As the types of gear become more complex and as new wiring options come on the market, you’re going to have to access the rear panels of your equipment and move wiring around. Home equipment racks help you store your equipment, keep it cool, and manage all the wiring behind the gear. Don’t be fooled by cheap racks. You are going to place a lot of expensive gear in this rack, and a rack should last you a lifetime. It used to be that you could stack all your equipment. That was okay until equipment started having more energy-hogging processors and other components that generate a lot of heat. Now if you stack your gear, you will burn out components, particularly if you put a PC in your cabinet. (DVD players are especially susceptible to heat damage.) You need to space the equipment and you need a cooling strategy for your gear. The right rack can solve these problems. Get a rack that does the following: Slides: Unless you have a special situation where you have rear access to your rack, say from a side room, changing cables in the back of your equipment is complicated. You’ll have to pull equipment forward to reconfigure jacks, and this can disconnect your other lines at the same time. A sliding rack brings the equipment forward, out of your cabinet, so you can access the rear panels. Rotates: A bonus is if the rack rotates once out of the cabinet, so you can maintain your connections. Once you’ve owned a rotating rack, you’ll never go back! Cools: Don’t buy a racking system without a built-in cooling system. Some offer the ability to connect several fans to the rack’s power system, and automatically turn them on and off based on temperature. Powers: Your racking system should have a means to connect to multiple power bars so all your power cables can be nicely managed. The best power bars have slide-on stabilizing clips that make sure your power plugs don’t come out of the power bar. Note: These power bars typically are not surge protectors — they are power-cable-management devices designed to help you keep all your cables in order. You will still want to route these into a surge protector at some point. You can buy high-end rack-mounted power protection that makes sure your power levels remain constant in your entertainment center. 45
Slide 68: 46 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes If you have a small space that’s shared with other things and you need to be able to move around equipment, consider putting the rack on wheels. When Danny was outfitting his new home theater, he asked a lot of people about racking because the market for residential racking systems was still new. Everyone pointed him to Middle Atlantic Products, Inc. (www.middle atlantic.com). Danny got a Middle Atlantic ASR-HD-42 system, which can hold up to 350 pounds of equipment, has adjustable shelves, and rotates 60º when extended out from the cabinet. (See Figure 2-3.) It has ventilated shelves, power and cooling management options, and — if you believe Danny’s raves — is the best-looking, best-made residential equipment rack on the market (which Pat believes, but never wants to give in so easily to Danny on such things). Figure 2-3: Danny’s rack allows access to his back panels without disconnecting wires. Racks can be pricey — you can spend more than $1000 on a high-end racking system. But if you go cheap here, you could lose much more than that in equipment. This is simply one area to invest in for the long haul.
Slide 69: Chapter 3 Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do In This Chapter Finding a flexible phone network Entertaining yourself with today’s home network Saving energy the smart-home way Accessing the Internet all over your house Exercising remote control Getting in the swim Attaining the paragon of smart homes “I am platform neutral — it doesn’t matter to me whether people receive telecommunication services by cable, satellite, streaming, wires, wireless cable, or mental telepathy.” — Rep. Tom Bliley, Chairman, Senate Commerce Committee regarding 1999 telecommunications network regulation W e can’t help you create a futureproofed plan for mental telepathy, but we certainly can help you with the rest of the telecommunication services that Representative Bliley referred to. (We’ll just assume that mental telepathy falls into the wireless category.) Soon, your home network will enable you to do numerous things that you never thought were possible.
Slide 70: 48 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Neat Phone Tricks When you define a phone in its historical sense — that is, a device with a handset and a base unit — lots of options are available to the home networker. You can Go multiline: Why install a second home-phone line that goes only to one phone? With the proper wiring, you could access that second line from any outlet in the house. Two lines not enough? How about three, four, or more lines? Get distinctive: How about giving all the members of the household their own distinctive ringing tones so that they know who the call is for when the phone rings? You can use certain phone company features along with your home-phone network to avoid buying extra phone lines for your household. Get conferenced: Although it may sound corporate, consumer-grade conferencing systems make sense if the speakerphones of most phones don’t do the trick. Get transferred: With a home-phone system, you can transfer calls around the house. Know that your spouse is in the garage? Send the call there. Intercom someone: A home-phone system is a great way to get a homewide intercom system. You can access different rooms by entering different extensions. And you can monitor rooms, too. By tying the system to your front door, you can have visitors leave a message on your phone system when you’re not home. Answer the door: Use one of the new Doorcom systems to answer the door when you’re away. These systems have a doorbell, speakerphone, and microphone — and with a smart home, they can call you where you’re vacationing to let you speak with the person at the door through the telephone. Get video: With a videophone, you can see who you’re talking to. (Depending on the time of day, that may or may not be a good thing.) Some videophones link up with your TV set for even better viewing but still use regular phone lines. Go wireless: A home phone is only as good as the length of its cord, but cordless phones give you freedom when you need to run all over the house. That’s not new. But what is new is the convergence of cordless base stations with cellular or digital mobile phones. These so-called dual-mode phones allow you to talk all you want for free (at least no
Slide 71: Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do airtime charges) when you’re near your base station, but they switch over to cellular or PCS frequencies when you leave your home. The phone — and your phone number — goes with you wherever you go. And lately, with the emergence of a lot of Wi-Fi (wireless computer network system) hot spots around the country and in homes, new multimode phones enable you to make free or low-cost calls over the Wi-Fi connection (and the Internet) when they’re in range — including at home. Control your home network: Some of the leading home-automation systems use the telephone as the interface to their system, using voice recognition and tone input to drive things around your house. Imagine calling your house and telling it to turn on the fire, turn down the lights, and let your spouse figure out the rest! Get some sleep: You can program your home-telephone system to automatically route inbound calls to an answering machine without ringing any of the phones in the house. Or you can selectively ring only certain phones in certain places. With the convergence of the computer and telephone realms, telephones look and act more like computers, and computers work more like phones. Some phones can send and receive e-mail as well as send faxes. Screen phones allow you to do everything from home banking to grocery shopping from the comfort of your nearest phone outlet. You can make phone calls from your PC through a microphone and a headset, or watch the called party on your computer screen. A properly designed home network will let you do whatever you want with any of these devices. 49 Entertainment Everywhere Your home-entertainment system can cost a lot of money, but when you go to your bedroom at night, that stack of electronics equipment in the living room is pretty much useless. A home network allows you to tap into that media complex instead of duplicating it in each room. A great home network will take that showcase of an entertainment center and distribute it around the house. That makes each room a showcase. A smart home allows you to Roam the house: Want to watch a movie stored on your Media Center PC in your bedroom or watch CNN while cooking dinner? By running your home network to these rooms, you can distribute the audio and video signals to these locations as easily as you route the signal to your TV set in the living room.
Slide 72: 50 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Be flexible: Want to watch the beginning of a DVD in the living room but watch the end of the movie in the bedroom? No longer are you a slave to where a particular device (such as a DVD player) is located. Be creative: How about using the picture-in-picture capability of your TV set to monitor the kids in the playroom while you’re watching HBO? By linking your video-monitoring capability with your television systems, you can have the best of both worlds. Stay sane: Want to listen to holiday music over your intercom system, instead of blasting the stereo loud enough on the first floor so that you can hear it in your office on the third floor? Focus your investments: By making the most use of the devices you have, you can focus future investments on only those pieces that enable you to take maximum advantage of your existing equipment. Already have a DVD player, Blu-Ray player, DSS receiver, tape deck, CD player, and receiver? Great. Put your money into a great display or widescreen TV, and let those other devices drive the new video capabilities over the home network. Because video is such a critical feature of most households, it makes sense to make sure that you can maximize your pleasure through an entertainment network in your home. Save Energy — and Money Too When you network devices in your home, you build value. Part of that value is saving money. Following are some tasks that a smart home can perform that will save you money over the long term: Motorize window coverings: Large picture windows can hike the temperature of your house by several degrees, making the air conditioning work more often and harder — thus boosting bills. Motorized window coverings help keep your utility bills under control. Window coverings also save money by blocking out ultraviolet rays, which fade your upholstery and carpeting. You can control your coverings in many ways, including handheld remote controls, manual control from wall switch locations, timer controls, and even weather controls (for example, temperature sensors that close the blinds when it’s hot or cold). Control thermostats: You can save a significant amount on your heating and cooling bills if you better coordinate your heating and airconditioning systems. You can set up thermostats so that temperature settings change based on the time of day and the day of the week. You can also change settings based on factors such as energy costs, the weather, and occupancy.
Slide 73: Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do Control heaters and water pumps: Hot-water heaters and hot-water circulation pumps are big consumers of power. To save power, turn them on and off according to a schedule. Control gas usage: If you’re like Danny, you forget to turn off your gas grill, and it runs all night until the tank runs out of gas sometime during the next few days. Some advanced built-in outdoor grills have sophisticated controls. If the grill has an electric component, it can be controlled. The same is true for gas fireplaces. Manage when you’re away: When you go to work, you can tell your house to go into a user-defined away mode. This can mean closing drapes, lowering (or raising) temperatures, shutting off lights, and more. If you go away on vacation, your smart home can turn lights on and off to better simulate someone being home. 51 Internet Outlets For years, getting connected meant that you were having a phone line installed. Today, it means getting hooked up to the Internet. We probably don’t need to tell you how important having a connection to the online world has become to most people. And it’s not just for Web surfing or e-mail these days. Tens of millions of people use Instant Messaging (IM) programs on a daily basis, millions more use the Internet for making phone calls, and still millions more use social networking sites (such as Facebook.com and Myspace.com) for keeping in touch with friends around the world. Communications aren’t the only thing people are using the Internet for — more and more entertainment content (such as music, TV, and movies) come into our homes over the Internet connection as well. A smart home turns electrical, telephone, cable, and other wired interfaces into Internet outlets — tunnels through your brick and mortar to the wired world beyond. And smart homes don’t use just wireline access. They can be wireless, too. With a smart home, you can Network your computing resources: Why have a printer at each home workstation when printers are not used that much? Share one printer, one scanner, and Internet access among multiple devices to save money and make your overall data LAN simpler. Simultaneously access the Internet: Work in your office downstairs, accessing the corporate internal network (intranet). Your spouse could be in the living room on the couch ordering groceries from the local
Slide 74: 52 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes grocery store’s online Web site. Your 12-year-old son could be upstairs in his bedroom playing Everquest on a multiplayer Internet network. And your studious 10-year-old daughter might be accessing her school’s extranet, working on homework with other kids. All this could happen at the same time, over the same network. Make and receive phone calls through the Internet: With the right endpoint equipment, you can send and receive phone calls over the Internet. You make Internet phone calls with your PC, an adapter for your phone, an adapter for your fax machine, a videophone, or a special Internet telephony appliance (that essentially looks like a phone). Any of these things will allow you to communicate over the Internet, for free (or nearly so), with parties conceivably very far away. The true benefits of Internet connectivity come later, when all sorts of devices expect Internet connectivity. More on this in Chapter 4. Remote Control of Almost Everything Another great thing about a smart home is the control that you have. Depending on the complexity of your home-automation system, you could control everything from the drapes to the heating system. A smart home allows you to add control later by tapping the endpoints, so you can start modestly. With a home network, you can Control your lights: Simple home-automation systems attach to the electrical system and allow you to control your electrical devices from a common computing platform. You can turn lights on and off and check out the heating levels in different zones. Control your remote controls: We hate to admit it, but one of us (we won’t tell who) has seven remote controls in one room. Extending remote control over all your components to other rooms in the house would require a lot of extra remote controls. But with a truly smart home, you can extend control over those devices to other rooms by radio frequency or infrared extension units, so that you maintain the same level of control that you’d have if you were in the same room. We recommend (at least one of us does) that you get a universal remote control for those rooms, however.
Slide 75: Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do 53 GPS: Where the boys are Global Positioning System (GPS) is a locationfinding system that can tell you where you are based on its capability to triangulate signals from three or more satellites that orbit the Earth. It can usually spot you within 10 to 100 meters of your location. GPS capability is now being built into cars, cell phones, clothing, and more. GPS equipment and chips are used in amusement parks to help keep track of your kids. There are even fun games for kids based on GPS; for information about a treasure hunt game, for example, check out www.geocaching.com. Control your computers: One of the benefits of having connectivity to your various computers on the same network is that you can do things in a coordinated way. For instance, suppose you wanted to back up your computers on a regular basis. You can create a schedule on one computer and have it access the hard disks of the other computers on the LAN and create a copy of key files. A truly wired user will store these files off site, in case of fire or the theft of the machines. You can also coordinate new software upgrades as well as virus and junk e-mail protection. Being connected makes a lot of functionality possible in the computer realm. Control your life: Some home-management systems have automated enunciators that can tell you things you ought to know, such as today is your mother’s birthday or the day to take out the trash. Linked with the Internet, telephone, or intercom systems, these commands can be sent to specific locations — such as catching you as you walk out the door. “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up!” You don’t just have to keep a smart home for yourself; you can share it with others. A smart home has something for everyone and can be tailored to the needs of special interests, such as the elderly, families with young children, or family members with specific disabilities. The great thing about having a strong smart-home foundation is that you can make it flex in many ways depending on what you want to do. Here are some examples: Turn on lights: We joke about “Clap on, clap off,” but we have to give the nod to the Clapper as one of the early moves toward home automation — after all, it’s merely an occupancy sensor switch based on sound. The familiar Clapper has gone high-tech over the years and now includes clap
Slide 76: 54 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes indication lights to aid with proper clapping and a sensitivity dial to increase or decrease the Clapper’s sensitivity to your unique clap. You can also program it to turn on when it hears any sound at all. This isn’t good when you’re home, but it’s a great theft deterrent when you’re at work or on vacation. Watch your grandkids: It’s never been easier to have a video chat with your kids. No more fancy phone lines, special devices, and expensive software. All you need is a standard broadband connection (you can use dial-up lines, but you won’t be satisfied), a $50 to $100 Web camera (we like www.logitech.com), and free software from any of a range of players, including Yahoo (messenger.yahoo.com). With Yahoo’s Super Webcam mode, for instance, you can have great quality pictures. The video picture frames refresh up to 20 frames a second, and the maximum resolution is 320 x 240. This is not quite TV-picture resolution, but it’s getting there. Talk to your doctor: One of the leading manufacturers of implanted medical device, Medtronic, Inc. (www.medtronic.com), has developed a service that allows doctors to monitor patients at home. At the core of this offering is the Medtronic Monitor, a small, easy-to-use device that allows patients to collect information by holding a small “antenna” over their implanted device. The monitor automatically downloads the data and sends it through a standard telephone connection from anywhere in the 50 states directly to the secure Medtronic CareLink Network. Clinicians access their patients’ data by logging onto the clinician Web site and make decisions at any time and from anywhere through an Internet-connected computer or laptop. Patients can view information about their devices and conditions on their own personalized Web site, and family members or other caregivers also can view this information if granted access by the patient. The Medtronic CareLink Network is intended to support a wide range of implanted cardiac devices — including Medtronic pacemakers, heart failure devices, and monitoring and diagnostic devices — as they become available following FDA approvals. Get help now! Surely you’ve seen the “I’ve fallen and can’t get up!” commercials. This cuts to the heart of a major issue for those who are often alone at home: What if something happens and no one is around to help? Various firms (www.seniorsafety.com, for one) have put together a service that links a waterproof wireless transceiver (worn around your neck or wrist) with a central unit plugged into your phone jack and electrical outlet. When the button is pushed on the receiver, it contacts the central unit, which calls a 24-hour monitoring center. In about 40 seconds, they open a voice-to-voice channel to the central unit, which means they can speak back and forth with you from basically wherever you are in your home; you don’t even have to touch the phone. (The central unit usually has a very loud speaker and supersensitive microphone).
Slide 77: Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do See who’s outside, and then let them in: With a simple wireless camera and a link to your TV set, you can see who’s knocking at the door, so you don’t have to get up. And if you want to let them in without getting up, combine your intercom or home-phone system (like those sold by Panasonic, www.panasonic.com) with a door opener contact and just “buzz” someone in. 55 “Sit, Ubu. Sit!” Pets are a big part of any family. (If you ask us, they’re just one of the family.) A smart home doesn’t care what species you are. Here are some neat things you can do for your pets. Some are networked; others are smart on their own: Feed your pets when you’re away: From fish to cats to dogs, you can program automatic pet feeders to dispense food up to eight times a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It’s perfect for anyone who is not always on time to feed Rover, or who suddenly needs to take a trip. Keep your pet wet: Automatic drinking fountains continuously circulate and filter your pet’s water, making it more appealing than standing bowl water. A charcoal filter absorbs tastes and odors. A pitcher-like spout stands five inches above the floor, creating a long waterfall. Other products can keep your pet’s outdoor water bowl above freezing — hook the outlet to your temperature monitor and turn it on when it gets cold. Let your pet out: It’s one thing to put a pet door into your house, but how do you keep other animals out? Smart pet doors today sense a magnetic key on your pet’s collar and unlock to allow your pet to push through the flap. Stop your dog from barking: Is your neighbor’s dog driving you crazy? Systems can detect dog barking and issue a humane and effective high-pitched tone that quiets noisy dogs without inflicting harm or pain. The tone doesn’t cause pain to animals, but most dogs don’t like it and will stop needless barking. Stop those scratches on the doors: Most dog or cat owners have a lot of scratched paint by the door, where Fido or Fifi wanted to be let out. Well, why can’t they just page you like most normal pets? They can, with a wireless door chime. When your pet steps on the paw-shaped pad, it signals a wireless chime to the speaker unit. Keep your pet in the yard: Some electronic dog fences have a small low-voltage wire that you string under the ground along your yard’s perimeter; others are wireless. A sensor on your pet’s collar issues a warning tone when he or she starts straying off your property. Soon, you’ll have computer chips in your pet’s collar that can interface with the Global Positioning System (GPS) and a wireless phone network so that you can look on your computer and see where your pet is. Keep your dog warm (or cold): Make your doghouse a zone on your HVAC system and keep it automated with the rest of your house. Put a floor warmer in the doghouse, and in cold weather, turn up the heat on that puppy, literally! You can find smart pet-device sections at Smarthome, Inc. (www.smarthome.com).
Slide 78: 56 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Pool, Anyone? Pools are great to have, a pain to have, and a worry to have. Pools provide fun under the sun but have to be maintained. And if you have little kids around, a pool is a constant worry. A smart home can maximize your enjoyment and minimize your fears in the following ways: Control your watery environment: While a pool seems simple — it’s just a hole in the ground (or a tank above ground) filled with water — it can get quite complex, particularly if you add a spa, a waterfall, house and garden lighting, and other such amenities. Vendors such as Jandy (www.jandy.com) offer home-automation kits that can help you control filter pumps, pool and spa heaters, and many more electrically operated features with the push of a button. The system also allows for handheld wireless remote-control access, telephone access, and PC access of all features driven by its system. It can also interface with any RS-232 “intelligent” home-automation system. (RS-232 is a communications protocol used by many computers and automation systems. See Chapter 20 for more information.) Monitor water levels: A low water level risks serious damage to your filter system and pump. Overfilling your pool wastes water and greatly reduces filter and skimmer effectiveness. A water-level controller maintains water at the preset level. You just attach a garden hose, adjust the float level, and you’re ready to go. Check out www.poolkeeper.com for one that’s easy to install. Use in-pool movement alarms: A range of devices can alert you if someone falls in the pool. These protect kids and pets alike. (Pets find it difficult to climb out of pools.) Make sure that the alarm solution you select can be used with a solar blanket on the pool. Check out www. poolguard.com for its Pool Guard PGRM-2. Use gate alarms: All pools should be fenced, but the weakest link in a fence is the gate. A gate alarm mounts next to any gate that gives easy access to your swimming pool. The gate alarm has a delay switch that allows an adult to pass through the gate without the alarm sounding. Get some turtles: If you have a child, especially one aged 1 to 4, you need a turtle for your pool: a Safety Turtle, that is, from Terrapin Communications (www.safetyturtle.com). Safety Turtle is a watchband-like water-sensitive device that transmits a special signal to its base station when the wearer comes into contact with water for a duration of time. Fencing and gate alarms aren’t enough. Safety Turtle is not just for kids. Pet owners buy them for their precious furballs, and spouses buy them for their elderly in-laws (in Florida, more elderly people die in pool accidents than kids).
Slide 79: Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do Think about automatic pool covers: Automatic pool covers eliminate water evaporation, seal in heat, and reduce pool equipment use. In fact, a good cover can act as a giant passive solar collector, and in combination with its thermal qualities, can raise the pool water temperature 10 degrees or more in season. This in turn can mean up to a 70 percent reduction in heating costs, chemical bills, pool pump electrical bills, and pool water bills. And you can link your pool-cover-control mechanism to your home-automation system to make sure that your pool is covered when it’s not in use. No more Saturday mornings cleaning the pool. Check out www.sunsystemsinc.com. The great thing about a lot of the pool safety devices is that they can be integrated into your regular alarm and security system, including their monitoring and alert mechanisms. So if you’re not at home and someone is in your pool, something can still be done about it. (Sorry, Pat, no more sneaking into the neighbor’s pool!) Remember, though, that none of these safety products replaces the need for adult supervision of all people in the pool area. 57 To Infinity and Beyond! In the previous sections of this chapter, we describe things you can do today, to some degree. In this section, we want you to imagine what you’ll be able to do with a home network in the near future. Connect your kitchen appliances and more Being interconnected will make it possible to use common consumer devices to do seemingly odd tasks. Here are some examples: Check your e-mail on your refrigerator: New, thin, touch-screen, flatscreen computer monitors will fit nicely into your refrigerator door — which is mostly insulation anyway — without compromising much. Add the appropriate computer chip and LAN access to the innards, and you have a heavy computer that also serves ice. Now you’ll have a place to keep your shopping lists, send and receive e-mails, and maintain all your phone numbers. Surf the Web on your microwave: We have no idea why you’d want to use this feature, but trial products are on the market that allow you to surf the Web from your microwave. Waiting three minutes for your lunch to warm up can be a pain, but that’s probably not enough time to check a Web site. Still, occupy your lunch-warming time with closing stock quotes, appointment reminders, weather predictions, school closings, and so on. Personally, we’d go with the refrigerator.
Slide 80: 58 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes A speech odyssey HAL2000 software, from Home Automated Living Company (www.automatedliving. com), will allow you to operate TVs, DVD players, CD players, tape players, and other household components just by ordering them around. HAL2000 uses its own speech-to-text software to send commands to designated devices. You can turn on lights, announce who’s on the phone all over the house, and check your e-mail. If the system doesn’t understand you, it prompts you to be more specific, with questions such as, “Did you mean a tape from the VCR or a tape from your audio tape player? . . . Dave? . . . Dave? . . .” Tie your sprinkler system to www.weather.com: Never get caught watering your lawn in the rain again! By tying your sprinkler to the Internet, you’ll be able to check the weather predictions and let your sprinkler system decide whether to water the lawn as scheduled. During periods of high temperatures, the system may decide to water more frequently. And if you’re in a drought area, it can forgo a cycle by monitoring bans on watering lawns. Keep your car tuned: Most new cars have computer chips that track the vehicle’s health. Imagine driving into your garage each night and having a remote sensor interrogate your automobile about its day — and interact with remote databases and troubleshooting systems at your car’s manufacturing facility. This system will be able to track your oil change needs and automatically schedule an appointment with your dealership. It will also be able to download to your car’s hard disk the latest maps for your area, your updated calendar, and revised phone contacts for your car’s cell phone. Talk to your TV: New technology coming out of the voice recognition industry will turn your home into Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. If your smart home has a microphone in each room, you can say, “Computer, put the incoming message on the screen,” just like Captain Picard. (By the way, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, our lives revolve around Star Trek and Disney World!) For more information on this brave new technology, check out the sidebar titled “A speech odyssey.” Stay healthy: Interconnecting your kitchen with computer resources in your home and on the Internet will give you great access to all sorts of nutritional information and online recipe sites. Imagine tracking your diet on a device in your kitchen, and asking for a suggested dinner based on what you ate last week and what you have in the pantry right now. You’ll be able to converse with your virtual chef to refine the menu given your preferences for the evening.
Slide 81: Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do 59 Let your TV show you the Web Because people without computers are keen on using their familiar television interface to surf the Internet, manufacturers have been scurrying to bring the Web to your TV screen. A smart home allows you to directly access the Web through your TV set. The current technology works almost like a toggle switch — you can either view the TV or surf the Internet, but not necessarily at the same time, except maybe by using picture-in-picture capability. (This is what Microsoft’s MSN TV2, — what used to be called WebTV — does.) What’s coming down the pike is a wonderful combination of the two together, and the sky is truly the limit here. Here are some things you’ll be able to do: Click your favorite actor: Ever watch a movie and say, “I know that actor from somewhere,” and then for the rest of the movie try to figure out who the guy is? With these emerging TV/Internet technologies, you click the actor’s image to access his or her resume, complete with prior roles. Want to go to that actor’s fan site? Click an icon designed for that purpose. Want to send the actor an e-mail? Click another icon. When your TV and the Web are connected, they can intertwine shows and databases to create awesome opportunities. Click your favorite product: Imagine watching a 30-second commercial and wanting to find out more about the advertised product. With converged TV/Internet products, you’ll be able to click the product and go to a Web site that lists the product’s features and characteristics. Click another place and see reviews from leading publications such as Consumer Reports. Click an icon and see the lowest prices for that product. Like the new gadget James Bond is using in his film? Find out where to buy one by clicking it. The appearance of specific products on TV shows will change drastically, going well beyond the crass commercialism in The Truman Show. Click Grandma: Combine a small video camera and microphone with your TV monitor, and you create an instant videoconferencing opportunity. Using your smart home’s data backbone, you’ll be able to hop on the Internet and conference with others. Let Grandma share in your Christmas by enabling her to watch her grandchildren open their presents on the screen. Click your siblings, too, and have a family videoconference. What a great way to show everyone the new baby! Make phone calls on your computer You may not realize that your phone calls are really data calls. When you speak into your telephone, your local phone company most likely digitizes
Slide 82: 60 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes your call and sends it across its massive telephone network to either another phone locally or another local or long-distance carrier for completion. These telephone networks are carrying data — bits of your phone conversation. So when people first started talking about carrying voice calls over data networks, many said, “What’s new about that? Businesses have been doing that for a while.” What is new is consumers having the capability to make calls from their computers. The combination of the audio hardware found on almost all new PCs and broadband Internet connections allow you to easily make VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone calls from your computer using software such as Skype. In fact, you can make VoIP phone calls without even touching your PC by using a device called an ATA (analog telephone adapter). With the capability to make calls from your computer and over the Internet, you can do the following: Have a home PBX: A PBX (private branch exchange) or switch, which most companies use to run their phone networks, is like a mini telephonecompany switch that can transfer calls from one extension to another, provide voice mail, do call holding, and so on. By running your home phones on your data network instead of your phone network, you can provide each handset with sophisticated features that you may not otherwise be able to afford. Some of the newest services on the market enable firms to extend their PBX functionality to employees’ homes through high-speed local-access connections. You could have one or more extensions at home that look and operate the same as at work, including allowing interextension dialing within the corporation. Receive faxes on your TV: Just like phone calls, fax transmissions are beginning to move to the Internet. You can buy equipment or services that translate faxed documents into digital Internet packets and send them over the Net. At the receiving end, you can choose to print the fax on a fax machine or receive the document as an e-mail attachment. When your TV becomes part of your home’s Internet connection — and that will happen soon — you’ll be able to preview and read your incoming faxes on your TV screen. (Later, you can print them over your home-computer network.) Shop in Hong Kong: Envision going to a booth at your local mall, having your body’s dimensions scanned, and then using this information to shop anywhere in the world. No more too-short shirts! You’ll be able to surf the Internet on your TV, find the outfits you want, choose the color and patterns, and then order a custom-fitted garment. You’ll even be able to use your videoconferencing link or Internet telephony capability to talk with the tailors about your suit. In addition, many larger firms in the textile industry cut their garments using computer-driven lasers. Imagine having your scan feed directly into that!
Slide 83: Chapter 3: Cool Stuff Home Networks Can Do 61 Check up on your house over the Net Although home-automation systems have been around for a long time, they’re still in their infancy. Most of the systems are either old technology (the inexpensive X10 systems) or expensive, custom-built systems. Luckily, a bunch of vendors are starting to offer solutions based on new standards such as ZigBee and Z-Wave (see Chapters 19 and 20 for more information) that combine better performance and reliability with ease-of-use and installation. We’re starting to see home-control systems that integrate more fully into your data and telephone networks, enabling them to be controlled remotely. Traditionally, custom systems have a telephone interface that enables you to dial in and use the keypad (or even your voice in some instances) to issue commands to the system controller. The next logical step in this process is to provide a Web interface — and many are launching these services now. Suppose that one of your home’s PCs, using an always-on fast Net connection, also powers your home-control systems. This home-control software functions as a Web server to allow you to access your home-control system from your office desktop, an airport kiosk, or even your Web-enabled handheld PC. You simply bring up the URL of your home server, log in, and then navigate through the home-control Web page to turn on lights, turn up the heat, or even fire up the hot tub. Pretty cool, huh? With the newest systems, you don’t need to involve the PC. Your standalone home controller, like those sold by Control4, www.control4.com, can handle all your needs without a PC. For example, the Control4 home-control system connects to your broadband Internet connection and “talks” to Control4’s Web servers. Without setting up your own in-home Web server, you can log into my.control4.com and (using a username and password to authenticate yourself) remotely control your system from any Web browser anywhere in the world. Here are just a few of the tasks that this type of interface will be able to perform: Control your appliances’ usage: More and more, companies will give you incentives to behave in certain ways. For instance, the power company may encourage you to run laundry at certain hours of the day. A smart home-automation system will be able to interact with the power company’s pricing system to determine the best time of the day to do certain tasks, and then perform those tasks according to those schedules, if that’s what you want. Power companies in some parts of the country already have different rate periods.
Slide 84: 62 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes See through walls: Your home-network security system will include a video monitor for the front door, allowing you to see who’s there before you open the door. By further interconnecting your security system with Internet access, you can monitor your home remotely, from any Web interface. Suppose that you’re at work but think that someone sent an important overnight package to your home office by accident. With this technology, you’ll be able to call up your smart home’s Web page and check out the video picture of your front stoop. If your hunch is correct, you can go home and get the package. You’ll also be able to monitor your nanny from work, or make sure that the kids aren’t throwing wild parties while you’re away! Turn up the heat: With a good smart-home design, your telephone system will be interconnected with your heating and cooling systems, which will allow you to monitor and control those systems remotely. Going to go up to your smart vacation home for the weekend? With a remotely controlled home-automation system, you’ll be able to call ahead and turn the heat on. Check who’s home alone: Or have your system dial out to your own pager number when someone (maybe a burglar) enters the back door. With an interconnected system, almost anything is possible.
Slide 85: Chapter 4 Timelines and Budgets In This Chapter Determining your network desires Thinking about money and budgets Getting help along the way Scoping your project’s timeline our smart-home adventure starts in two places: in your head and in your wallet. You need to know where you’re going and how much you’re willing to spend to get there. In addition, you need to figure out how much of this project you’re willing to do yourself. All sorts of consultants, systems integrators, contractors, and others can help ensure smart-home success. This chapter helps you figure out when to use these folks. You also find out about budgetary and timeline considerations. Y New or Existing Home? The most important issue when wiring your home is whether you have a new home or an existing one. We present all possible options in a home that you’re wiring from scratch. But we also describe choices that you can pursue if a whole-home wiring solution isn’t possible in all parts of your home. Even if you have an existing home, wired solutions aren’t necessarily out of the question. Contractors can snake cables through walls to install alarms, intercoms, phone systems, data networks, and automation systems. You may want to rely more heavily on wireless systems or ones that utilize existing wires. If you instead decide to run new wires, you should search for an experienced telephone or alarm installer who can find some creative ways to run and hide new wires without having to rip open walls.
Slide 86: 64 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes What Do You Want from Your Home Network? The first step in planning your home network is determining what you want it to do. Do you want a fully automated home, with lights that turn themselves on, drapes that open and shut on their own, and a remote-controlled HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) system? Do you want a high-speed computer network that lets you plug a PC or laptop into a jack anywhere in the house and get Internet access? Do you want a sophisticated communications system, with multiple telephone lines, video monitors at the doors, and intercoms throughout your home? Going for broke (literally) from the beginning is neither necessary nor wise. However, it is wise to use any wiring or rewiring opportunities (such as a newly constructed home or one that you’re ripping apart for remodeling) to get enough wires to enough places to enable your home network to grow with your needs, without the hassle and expense of doing the wiring all over again. Whatever you decide to do, it’s best to install a home network all at once in a well-thought-out fashion. Home networking in a haphazard way results in, well, what most ad hoc do-it-yourselfers’ wiring projects look like — a mess. So before you begin designing a network and wiring plan for your home, think through how you’re going to use each room in the home. Do so with an eye toward the future. Suppose that you have a spare bedroom that needs only a phone jack and a cable TV outlet. That room may be your home office someday, in which case you’d need wiring for an extra phone as well as some computer networking capabilities. Or perhaps the room will turn into a nursery, so you’d want an intercom and maybe a video monitor. And when the kids get older, they may need a place to hook up a computer or plug in an entertainment system. As you explore your many home-networking options, aim toward flexibility for the future. Deciding How Much to Spend Prewiring your entire home for every contingency may not be as expensive as you think. Several well-respected vendors offer all-in-one kits that put high-speed data communications, telephony, video, home entertainment, and (in some cases) security wiring in place with little or no thinking on your part. Check out Chapter 2 for more information on all-in-one cable solutions.
Slide 87: Chapter 4: Timelines and Budgets You can also apply the everything-everywhere solution and run high-speed data cables, coaxial video cables, and speaker cables to several jacks in every room of your home. Many homeowners follow this route. Even though you’ll be making choices about what you can do right now, don’t forget about building a robust, futureproof wiring system into your home. In fact, running higher-quality, more capable wiring doesn’t cost much more than running old-fashioned telephone and cable TV wires. And while you’re at it, install conduits (mentioned in Chapter 2) to make running cables easier in the future. One of the great things about building a smart home is that many of the network’s components — wiring panels, cable runs, keypads, switches, and so on — are already part of the home’s structure, which means that you can usually finance this cost as part of your mortgage. This option helps you stretch out the upfront cost of installing these systems. 65 Going Over the Costs The cost of a home network varies depending on many factors, such as the costs in your particular area and how fancy you get. We can, however, provide general information about how much you can expect to spend. We base our prices on a typical home: two floors, three bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, and a partially finished basement. To cover a larger area, you need to add the cost of extra wiring runs and some extra endpoints. Most of the cost of an audio- and video-distribution system is in the audio and video equipment itself rather than in the networking infrastructure and components. Audio and video equipment is usually housed in the home-media center. (Part II explains this equipment in detail.) Here are some general costs: Home theater: A home theater can cost you as little as $1000 if you go with a moderate-sized TV set and a home-theater-in-a-box surroundsound audio system. A really great home theater runs $7,000 to $20,000. Installation costs about 10 percent of your component parts. Coaxial distribution panel: Expect to spend about $300 to $400 for a coaxial distribution panel for your home network. Other networks in your home involve the following costs: Phone system: A phone system costs $50 to $100 per outlet or from $500 to $1500 for a centralized whole-home phone system. Data network: Data networks are relatively inexpensive — less than $200 to buy and install the necessary central components and about $50 to $100 per cable run, including cable, connectors, faceplates, and so on.
Slide 88: 66 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Home-security system: A home-security system averages about $1200 to install. You also pay about $25 a month for monitoring fees — about half of that if you use one of the Internet-based monitoring services we discuss in Chapter 18. Home-automation system: The cost of your home-automation system can vary widely. The cost to turn some lights on and off with a computercontrolled timer is much less than the cost to have androids serve breakfast in bed, for example. The average simple DIY home-automation project costs around $500 to $1000 (for example, to install a lightingcontrol system), and a fancier, centrally controlled whole-home system (with professional installation and configuration) starts off at around $5000. Depending on what you need to do, you may be able to get away with paying less than these amounts. But we’d rather scare you with big numbers first — while showing you all the ways that you can step down in price and still have a great home network — than throw unrealistically low numbers your way and set the wrong expectations. Whatever you do, don’t start the process by saying, “I don’t want to spend a lot of money on this project.” Instead, approach the process with an open mind: Think about what features you’d like to have, share that information with some home-networking experts, and see what happens from there. The Home Team The people involved in your project vary according to what you’re trying to accomplish. If you plan install a major home theater — complete with theater seats, a popcorn and candy stand, and screen curtains — you’ll probably bring a home-theater consultant into the process. Most people don’t want or need to go to that level. The cast of characters for your home-networking project can include the following: Architect: This person helps you lay out the initial plans for your home and coordinate with other designers to get their respective visions on paper. Architects create the plans that guide all the activity in the house, but they need the contribution of your individual contractors. Many architects don’t have the level of specialty necessary to finalize your wiring plans, but the architect’s drawings are key to making sure, for example, that all your speakers are correctly placed in your homeentertainment theater.
Slide 89: Chapter 4: Timelines and Budgets Audio/video consultant: Your audio/video (A/V) consultant helps you select the right mix of components for your sight and sound systems and then integrate all those components. Your A/V consultant makes sure that the appropriate wiring is run to support your installations and then installs the gear when you’re ready. If you’re installing a dedicated home theater, expect your A/V consultant to get involved with the architect early on, too, making recommendations for room sizes, building materials, and so on. The A/V consultant may also hand you off to a specialized home-theater consultant if the job is too complex for his or her comfort. (Home-theater consultants get into additional details such as soundproofing, seating, lighting, and the room’s shape and construction). Contractor/builder: The general contractor/builder’s role is to direct the other specialty contractors and make sure that they carry out the intent of the designers. Passing correct information from one contractor (such as the home-theater consultant) to the people doing the work (such as the cabinetmaker who builds the home-theater cabinetry) is crucial. The details are what count here, such as cutting out the right size cubbyhole for the kitchen media center. Computer-systems contractor: If you work at home or have complex computer-networking needs, bringing in a computer-systems contractor to network your computer hardware and interface it to the appropriate systems can be a great timesaver. Electrical contractor: The electrical contractor is a staple of any new home project. Because your smart home may require additional or different electrical wiring (for example, special configurations in your electrical panel to allow home automation over power lines), hiring an electrical contractor who is experienced with smart homes is a plus. Heating/cooling contractor: Having a smart home is not just about having a home-control system that turns fans on and off. A smart heating and cooling system has many nuances, such as different zones for maximum control and specialized controls for specific areas (such as that wine cellar you were thinking about). Your heating/cooling contractor can make sure that your system is energy efficient while meeting your requirements. Home-systems integrator: This person integrates all the different electronic systems in your house but may or may not do the actual installations; specialists for each subsystem may do part of the work. The integrator should be able to provide your architect with recommendations regarding where to put your centralized wiring closet or where to run the wires for specific applications. The home-systems integrator also works with the interior designer to address layout and appearance issues. 67
Slide 90: 68 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Interior designer: This person is responsible for making sure that your home-network technology doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Installing a state-of-the-art home-entertainment center in the living room is one thing — making it fit with the overall scheme of your home is another. The interior designer works with your consultants to ensure that what is visible is pleasing to the eye. Kitchen designer: This expert helps you figure out not only a sensible layout for your kitchen but also your options for integrating the latest technologies into your smart-home design. This designer should work closely with the home-systems integrator. Lighting consultant: Often an overlooked task on a to-do list, lighting design has an important effect on the ambiance of your home, so consider specialized lighting in key areas. A lighting consultant works early on with the home-systems integrator and the architect to define the lighting-control requirements and to select a system. The actual wiring, however, is typically handled by the electrical contractor or homesystems integrator — unless the lighting arrangement is complex, in which case a specialized lighting contractor may be called in. Security consultant: The security consultant and contractor design a system specifically for your home, and then install it. They make sure you have the right coverage to meet your security goals and ensure that the system interfaces with other subsystems, such as with telephone lines for calling out to the central station if a burglar trips a sensor. Whew! Did we leave anyone out? Depending on the amount of money you want to spend, you may indeed have this many people making your smart home a reality. A more modest project has a more modest number of people stomping around your house. Also, many of the previously mentioned professionals — kitchen designers, for example — include their services when you purchase their equipment. Make sure that you choose advisors who share your vision of an ideal smart home. The people you choose should have experience with smart, networked homes. Some contractors are conservative and don’t want to overbuild. Others are liberal and plan for everything under the sun. Find your wired personality and match it with your contractors, and you’ll have a winning combination. You might have a hard time finding some of these contractors — it’s not like the phone book has a section titled “Smart Homes” (at least not yet!). For the more traditional groups of professionals (such as architects), we tend to rely on word-of-mouth, recommendations from in-the-know friends, and a thorough review of the contractor’s references. For contractors who will be installing your home’s electronics and wiring infrastructure, we do these same things, as well as check their credentials. The Custom Electronics Design & Installation Association, or CEDIA, is one of the best places to start. This
Slide 91: Chapter 4: Timelines and Budgets group (www.cedia.net) has a rigorous training and qualification program for people who do nothing but build and install smart-home systems for a living. 69 Starting Down the Smart-Home Path Your first step in building your whole-home network is to visualize what you want. Then you need to sit down with your designers and consultants to refine your vision into a cost-effective reality. The following list is a rough timeline you can use as you’re planning and building your wired home. Your timeline, however, may take half as long or twice as long: Month 1: Meet and interview various key consultants, and then hire your choices; visit demonstration rooms; visit libraries and bookstores for ideas and cappuccino. (By the way, you’ll be doing great if you can keep this effort to only one month.) Month 2: If you’re part of the 1 percent who can afford a customdesigned home, you’re ready to sit down with your architect and start brainstorming the design. Plan to spend at least a month or two in this process. Then the architect or builder creates the plan with your specific needs in mind. Although it’s early in the process, you may also want to choose an interior designer. Month 3: You make the final refinements to your plans. Typically, the architect draws up not only floor plans but also electrical wiring plans for key subsystems. Unfortunately, few architects will read this book before designing your system, so they may provide a standard plan. You need to find a home-networking specialist or work closely with the architect to describe the needs of each room and the system as a whole. Month 4: You request bids and select a builder; you finalize the budget and plans; you and the builder approve the detailed drawings of wiring schematics and special construction; and the builder applies for and receives permits. These things may take more than a month, but we’re optimists. Month 5: The lot is cleared; the foundation is dug; the security team is on hand to survey the site and external installations; the pipes and wiring are installed under the foundation; and the foundation is poured. Months 6–8: The framing is finished; the windows and roof are installed; key consultants tour the site for revisions and planning; and plumbing and heating contractors install their wiring, piping, and conduit. (If your new house is big or the weather is bad, this phase could take longer than two months.)
Slide 92: 70 Part I: Future-Perfect Homes Month 9: Both before and after the electrician does the electrical work, various contractors install data, telephone, security, audio, video, and other special wiring. The insulation goes in. Months 10–12: Sheetrock and plaster are installed; interior wood and finishing work begins, including any special cabinetry; the A/V contractor installs any in-wall speakers and intercom systems; the telephone/ data systems team installs the data/telephone systems; the security contractor installs endpoint devices and the control system; the electrical contractor and lighting designer install lighting and controls; the plumber installs fixtures; and the home-automation expert coordinates installation of the home-control system. Month 13: Final construction is performed on the interior of the house; subcontractors finish their installations; testing is performed; and systems are checked. You’re probably closer to month 18 by now, and you’ve probably blown your budget. But the important part is to make it through alive and with your marriage intact. Don’t forget about the building inspector. The best-laid plans can succumb to a busy building inspector whose approval is often required to go to the next stage of your multistage project. You do need to coordinate what kind of cables will be installed in any special conduits placed to make running wires easier. For instance, running electrical wiring in the same conduit as your telephone, data, or A/V wiring is a bad move because electrical lines create electromagnetic flux that ruins your data and video throughput, not to mention your phone calls. Installing electrical cables adjacent to other cables is surprisingly common in many new-home construction projects, so look out for it. After all the rough-in work is complete (and wires are all over the place), the sheetrock and other wall coverings go up. Although some items, such as inwall speakers, go in before all the finish work is complete, much of your gear goes in only after everything else is just about finished. You attach all your components to their connection points, and install the control panels. After the rough-in work and wiring is finished but before the sheetrock goes up, use a video or digital camera to document what wires are running where (including where the empty conduits start and stop). Some day you might need to add a cable to a conduit, or fix a wire that a rodent ate through (yes, they do that; and yes, we’re talking about rats; and yes, depending on where you live, you can get rats in your house, no matter how often you clean the kitchen and take out the trash). Testing can be exhaustive, but you can never test too much before accepting a house from your collective of contractors. Make sure to hook equipment to all your outlets and test, test, test.
Slide 93: Part II Making Your Home an Entertainment Center
Slide 94: F In this part . . . ace it: The television is a major focus of almost any home, worldwide. In our business, we’ve traveled all over the globe. We’ve seen tents in the desert with camels parked out back, dinner cooking over a fire, and a TV set inside. People like and want their video. Those enamored with audio feel just as strongly. The key is building your home-entertainment system so that you can enjoy it everywhere you want to — not just in the confines of a particular room or a particular space. Your home-entertainment system should be in the whole home, omnipresent to the point of total flexibility. In this part, we tell you how to create a home-entertainment backbone in your house. We discuss the major elements of a whole-home audio and video network and the advantages of connecting all multimedia elements together. We talk about the different inputs and outputs required and provide some tips and tricks for ensuring the success of your home-entertainment system. We also make sure you’re up to speed on the latest developments in entertainment equipment and networking, such as HDTV and Internet-based content, and on the effect these innovations will have on your networking strategy and requirements.
Slide 95: Chapter 5 Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck — Without Breaking the Bank In This Chapter Making your home more fun Understanding tubes, screens, and thinner media Bringing the roof down (with sound) M ost homes contain a plethora of entertainment equipment — televisions, radios, CD players, stereo receivers, and more. (If you’re like us, you also have an old-fashioned turntable sitting prominently on a shelf someplace.) People tend to think of home-entertainment gear as stuff that’s used in a particular room — a stereo in the living room, televisions in the family room and bedroom, and maybe a radio in the kitchen. The best home-entertainment system is a network that leverages your investments in expensive audio and video equipment and lets you enjoy it wherever you are in the home. You put the bulk of the equipment in a common media center (such as a home-theater room), and then set up a suitable network infrastructure (wired or wireless or something else) to distribute the audio and video. In this chapter, we discuss the components you need to set up a home-audio and -video network. TV and Video Systems This section looks at some of the radical changes that television is undergoing — and we’re not talking about programming. Like most other devices before it, the television is in the midst of a leap from the analog to
Slide 96: 74 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center the digital world. Unlike many of those devices, however, TV is making the leap in a series of agonizingly slow steps. We discuss how this transition might affect your choices in the video world. We talk also about the various kinds of TVs you can buy. The conversion from analog to digital and old-style TV to next-generation TV comes into play in many places: The encoding of the programming signal itself The transmission path that the signal takes in getting to your house The receiver — internal or external — that receives and decodes the signal for display In the progression of standards and technical development, change is taking place along all three of these paths. Analog still rules the roost — but not for long The vast majority of television signals coming into homes are still analog. Analog TV signals reach homes through over-the-air broadcast TV, by traditional cable TV systems, and by satellite. (We discuss all the different ways TV signals get into your house later in the chapter.) In North America, an analog television format known as NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) has been in place for decades — in fact, it hasn’t been changed or updated since the advent of color television in the 1960s. Although this standard is capable of producing a surprisingly good picture under ideal circumstances, its analog nature makes it susceptible to various kinds of interference and signal degradation. Consequently, the picture can be downright awful by the time it gets to your television (which is why the TV world is slowly turning digital). There’s not much we need to tell you about analog TV — if you’ve turned on a television in the past fifty years, you’ve seen it. Just as the NTSC standard is common in North America (and Japan), a couple of other standards — known as PAL and SECAM — are common in other parts of the world. Unless you have a special TV designed for the purpose, you can’t watch PAL with an NTSC TV, and vice versa. This is one reason why you can’t buy videotapes in many parts of the world and use them at home.
Slide 97: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck 75 Digital is here! The move from analog to digital is well afoot. Tens of millions of homes have some form of digital TV, but the conversion from analog to digital is still an evolving process. The key concept behind any kind of digital TV is that the audio and video programming is converted from an analog signal into a series of digital bits (a whole lot of ones and zeros that make up a video picture). The primary technology behind any kind of digital TV (at least in the United States and Canada — other countries have their own variant of digital TV) is something called MPEG. Several video and audio compression and digitization standards are based on MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group). Most are named by adding a number to the end of the word MPEG. The MPEG-2 standard is by far the most common in the video world, with MPEG-4 coming on strong. The digital television that people receive today uses MPEG-2 to carry standard, analog NTSC TV signals digitally. This is an important fact to repeat: Much of what you see as “digital TV” is a standard analog TV signal, converted to digital. Digital over digital is our nirvana and is part of the HDTV world, as we discuss shortly. When this digitized signal gets to your house (over a digital cable system or a DBS satellite system), a set-top box converts the signal back to analog NTSC TV, which your TV understands and can display. This digital signal coming into your house isn’t inherently different than an analog one, but it usually looks and sounds better because the digital transmission path is cleaner and isn’t susceptible to the interference that usually messes up analog signals. Next-generation digital TV Much of today’s digital television isn’t all it can be. In the late 1990s, the FCC (the controlling regulatory authority for broadcasters, cable companies, and telephone companies in the United States) brought together a big bunch of television industry folks and — after a long, painful, and contentious process — came up with a new generation of digital TV. This new system, which goes by the name ATSC (Advanced Television Standards Committee), had defined a bunch of new, higher-definition television standards. Specifically, digital video signals (not analog ones) are transmitted using digital technologies and played on TVs set up to display these digital signals. It’s digital all the way, baby, as sportscaster Dick Vitale would say. (Did we mention we’re Duke Blue Devils fans, too!)
Slide 98: 76 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center What’s different about ATSC? When we talk about new ATSC-based televisions, we’re talking a whole new ballgame (or at least a whole new way to watch a ballgame). It takes only a glance to see the striking difference between older NTSC displays and the new ATSC ones. In general terms, the clarity and crispness of a television’s display is determined by the resolution, the scanning refresh rate, and the scanning method. You may be familiar with the concept of resolution if you own a PC, because PC displays are usually rated in terms of their resolution, or more specifically, the number of pixels (individual points of light and color in the display) that you can see. For example, smaller home-PC displays are set to show 800 pixels across by 600 pixels vertically; larger displays are often set to show 1024 across by 768 vertically, or more. Television manufacturers don’t usually mention the number of pixels across the screen, but they do list the vertical number — the lines of resolution, or scan lines. Today’s analog TV systems usually max out at 480 lines of resolution (and you don’t even receive all 480 — a few lines carry other information such as closed captioning). ATSC systems (HDTV, in other words) can broadcast at 480, 720, on up to 1080 lines of resolution. When looking at two screens of the same size and quality, the more lines of resolution, the better the picture. The other factor in determining the quality of a television or video signal is the scanning method. People generally talk about PC monitors and video systems in terms of their screen refresh rates — often using a number such as 75 hertz. This figure means that the picture on your PC’s video screen is updated 75 times every second. When talking about televisions, people discuss the scanning method to illustrate the same principle. TV puts an interesting twist on the scan line refresh rate, however. A TV with a progressive scan display refreshes all lines of resolution (480 or 720 or 1080) during a cycle. (TVs refresh at a rate of 60 cycles per second — for comparison, film movies do so 24 times a second.) Other TVs offer interlaced scan display, which means that they refresh half the screen — every other line — each cycle, so each line is refreshed only 30 times per second. Theoretically, a progressive scan system has a better picture than an interlaced one, but because both refresh the picture many times per second, the difference isn’t immense. These new higher-definition television standards are different than the digital TV discussed in the preceding section. To view them in all their glory (and we’ve seen enough of high-definition television to tell you that it is indeed glorious), you need to buy the newer, fancier, better, more expensive TV. ATSC signals can be divided into different groups, depending on the resolution and the scanning method (as we discuss in the “What’s different about ATSC?” sidebar). They are further divided into SDTV, or standard-definition television (signals that are about the same or a little bit better than NTSC), and HDTV, or high-definition television (which has truly spectacular, film-like picture quality). Within the ATSC standard are dozens of SDTV and HDTV variations, but you’re most likely to see just four, as shown in Table 5-1.
Slide 99: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck Table 5-1 Name 480i 480p 720p 1080i 77 Common Digital TV Variants Scanning Method Interlaced Progressive Progressive Interlaced Lines of Resolution 480 480 720 1080 Quality Standard definition (same as NTSC) Standard definition High definition High definition To take advantage of all the benefits of digital TV, you’ll eventually have to replace your televisions. Today’s televisions don’t have the internal circuitry to decode digital TV signals, and they generally don’t have screens that can display high-definition ATSC pictures in all their glory. (And HDTV is the big deal in this story — we focus our discussion on HDTV rather than SDTV.) Today’s TVs aren’t even the right shape; the aspect ratio — the ratio of screen width to height — of HDTV signals is wider than that of NTSC signals. NTSC is 4:3; HDTV is 16:9. Figure 5-1 shows the difference in aspect ratios — the HDTV screen has an aspect ratio like the elongated screens in movie theaters. (You may have already been exposed to this aspect ratio because many movie DVDs today allow for this sort of widescreen viewing as an option.) HDTV-capable TV sets, which became available at the end of 1998, are more expensive than traditional sets. However, prices have come down significantly. When we wrote the first edition of this book, HDTVs were often more than $6000, but now you can get one for $750 or less. What about 1080p? If you are tuned into the HDTV world, you have no doubt heard a lot of talk about 1080p. This is the highest current resolution in the HDTV world — it’s simply a progressive scan version of 1080i, drawing the entire 1920 x 1080 pixels in each frame, rather than half of them at a time. Why don’t we have 1080p in Table 5-1? Well, the simple answer is that 1080p is not going to be part of any broadcast (over-the-air, cable, or satellite) TV system anytime soon. Where you will find 1080p is in source devices that live in your home, such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD disc players and in gaming consoles such as Sony’s PlayStation 3. So 1080p can and probably will have a place in your home. But it won’t be coming in over your set-top box or other broadcast reception system.
Slide 100: 78 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Figure 5-1: An HDTV screen is this much wider than an NTSC screen. 4:3 Aspect ratio NTSC TV 16:9 Aspect ratio HDTV Two types of digital HDTVs are available: HDTV-ready TVs and HDTVs. HDTVready televisions have only a standard NTSC receiver; they have no built-in digital television receiver. However, you can connect them to an external HDTV receiver and display high-definition programming. The second type, HDTV, has a built-in receiver (or at least comes with an HDTV receiver that you hook up externally), so there’s nothing more to buy to receive over-the-air HDTV. We think it’s better to buy an HDTV-ready TV — you save a few hundred bucks, and then you can buy a receiver that works best with the system that provides HDTV (that is, an over-the-air antenna, digital cable, or satellite). I want my HDTV! Where are you going to get your HDTV programming? (And yes, we want our HDTV!) As we hinted, three possibilities are the same places where you get NTSC today: over-the-air broadcasters, cable TV systems, and satellite TV systems. For broadcast TV, the FCC gave (for free) each broadcast TV station the requisite additional broadcast spectrum for a different channel over which they could broadcast in ATSC digital format. The deal was this: The TV stations had to completely transition to digital by 2009 (February 19th of that year to be precise — after the Super Bowl), and then give the FCC their old channel so it could be assigned for other uses. In the summer of 2002, the FCC, trying to push this process along, made a ruling that every TV sold in America must have a receiver that can get ATSC broadcasts by 2007. Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that these TVs will be able to display HDTV (for example, they may not have a high enough resolution, or they may not be able to display widescreen content properly), but they will be able to receive it and display it at lower resolutions and at a 4:3 aspect ratio. Eventually, when enough of these TVs are in people’s homes, analog TV as we know it will go away, replaced by SDTV and HDTV. So far, there have been no requirements for cable and satellite companies to offer ATSC signals, but each has begun offering a number of channels of HDTV to go along with their existing programming. In fact, the biggest competitive
Slide 101: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck battle between cable and satellite TV providers these days revolves around the number (and quality) of HDTV channels they offer. You can expect to get 20 or more HDTV channels from either kind of provider, and both groups are making major upgrades to their networks to bring you hundreds of channels. After the switch to digital TV is complete, you won’t have to pitch your old TVs. Digital TV tuners, like those that the FCC is requiring in new TVs, will allow you to watch DTV programming on older TVs. Of course, the picture quality and resolution won’t be as high as it would be with a new digital set, and you might not have a widescreen (16:9) aspect ratio. 79 TV types For a long time, televisions have been pretty much identical, except for differences in their internal electronics and the quality of their construction. The advent of technologies from the computer world and the desire of many consumers to build home theaters that use large-screen TVs have dramatically altered this situation. A fourth option Cable, satellite, and broadcast are no longer the only games in town. IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) is the newest option, available to a small but significant (and growing) number of people. IPTV uses a combination of broadband connections to the home (such as DSL) and the Internet Protocol used for Web surfing, e-mail, and many phone calls (such as Vonage) to bring you cable and satellite-style TV over the Internet. The biggest proponents of IPTV are the phone companies, who are using the technology to compete with cable companies in the realm of what many call the triple play: high-speed Internet, voice services, and TV. In the United States, AT&T has invested heavily in IPTV and is offering it over a very high-speed variant of DSL called, appropriately, VDSL — very high-speed digital subscriber line — and is offering an IPTV service in dozens of its markets. Verizon, the other big phone company in the United States, has its own system for TV services, called FiOS, which replaces DSL and copper phone lines entirely and offers services over lightning-fast fiber-optic cables to the home. FiOS actually is not an IPTV service (both use the same technology that cable companies use, only over fiber instead of coaxial cables), but we expect that Verizon too will switch to IPTV eventually. It’s likely that even cable TV providers will begin using some IPTV technology because it is more spectrally efficient, thus allowing them to offer more TV channels over the same cable. Many cable companies are already using some elements of IPTV for their video-on-demand services. In the future, it’s possible you’ll hear less about IPTV (the technology) but see a lot of IPTV as many TV service providers move towards IPTV as one of their underlying technologies, while providing you a service that looks and feels just like their old-fashioned services.
Slide 102: 80 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center We’ve already talked a bit about digital TVs and HDTV. Now we’re going to talk about three different forms of TVs (direct-view, projection, and flat screen). None of these TV styles are inherently analog or digital — a specific model within each of these groups can be analog only or HDTV and digital compatible. Having said that, almost all projection and flat-panel TVs on the market today are HDTV-ready. Tubes for all: Direct-view TVs The traditional television — or a video display of any kind, for that matter — has always been the direct view, picture tube type. The screen you see is actually the front of a specially treated glass tube with an electron gun built into the back of the tube. This system works by shooting electrons through electronically controlled devices and onto the back of the picture tube’s screen. When the electrons hit the specially treated glass, it lights up in different colors and intensities (depending on how the electrons are aimed) and creates your picture. Tubes are a mature technology — having been on the market in large quantities for about 50 years — and they work pretty darn well. They do, however, have a few disadvantages: They’re big (in depth) and heavy (ever try to move a 35" television?). The technology itself limits screen size (few direct-view televisions are larger than about 40" measured diagonally). Large picture tubes with electron guns sophisticated enough to handle HDTV’s high resolutions are difficult to build (several makers have such models on the market, but they don’t offer the full 720 or 1080 lines of resolution needed for real HDTV). Tube TVs are essentially a dead-end technology. Most manufacturers have begun to shut down their picture tube factories and have moved to projection and flat-panel TVs instead. With a few exceptions, you’ll find that tube TVs are available only in the smallest sizes and for the cheapest models (think 13" $75 tube TV for the guest room). Projection TVs After you move beyond pretty large big-screen TVs (35" or so) to huge oh-mygoodness big-screen TVs, the form of the television changes from direct-view to projection, or PTV. Projection TVs come in two main types, as shown in Figure 5-2: Front-projection models: These high-end models consist of a projector mounted on the ceiling and a separate screen. Like a movie projector, these models project the TV video onto the front of the screen.
Slide 103: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck Mounted to ceiling Projector 81 Projector Figure 5-2: Two types of projection TVs. Screen Screen surface Front-projection TV Rear-projection TV Rear-projection models: The screen and projection systems are in the same chassis in these all-in-one units. Like a direct-view TV, these models beam the TV image onto the back of a screen. The cheapest rear-projection models cost between $1000 and $2000. Highquality front-projection models cost $3000 on up to $30,000 for the projector alone (not to mention the cost of the screen and professional installation, alignment, and focusing). Traditionally, projection TVs used CRTs, or picture tubes, (like the ones used in old-fashioned tube TVs) to project the image on a screen. These systems are what you find in the cheapest rear-projection TVs on the market — and what people used to think of as a big-screen TV — but like tube TVs, CRTbased projectors are being slowly but surely phased out. While they offer a great picture, they are hard to set up (and keep properly aligned, focused, and calibrated), and they are big, heavy, and bulky. The projector world has since moved on to microprojector systems, which use ultra-high-resolution chip-based picture engines instead of tubes. These microprojector systems are lighter, brighter, and significantly thinner (so they fit into your home, instead of you having to fit your home around them). They also offer excellent picture quality and don’t require nearly as much tinkering to maintain picture quality. Three main technologies are used for microprojection systems (for both front- and rear-projection TVs): DLP: An invention of Texas Instruments, DLP (www.dlp.com), or digital light processor, is a system that uses a chip containing millions of microscopic mirrors to reflect light onto the screen and make up a picture.
Slide 104: 82 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center DLP TV systems have very high resolutions (most are now capable of 1080p), have a bright picture, and are excellent at color reproduction. LCD: LCD technology is familiar to most people due to the LCDs used for computer monitors, cell phone displays, and LCD flat-panel TVs (discussed in the next section). But LCD can also be used for a projection TV system, using three tiny (about 1" measured diagonally) LCDs through which a bright light is shined. Each of the LCDs handles a specific color (red, green, and blue), and the converged images make up a full-color image on the screen. LCD projection TVs are high resolution (HDTV). However, many are not capable of the full 1080p resolution and top out at 720p. LCoS: The newest technology for microprojection systems is called liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS). This technology, familiar to many through brand names such as Sony’s SXRD, is a new variant of LCD technology that embeds the LCD crystals on a computer chip. The big functional difference is that LCoS systems reflect the light that makes up the picture instead of transmitting it through an LCD panel like LCD projection TV does. This provides a noticeably brighter picture. Like DLP, most LCoS projection systems are capable of 1080p resolutions. When compared to the flat-panel TVs we discuss in the following section, projection TVs are a bit bulkier (at least the rear-projection units are), but they are cheaper and can offer a bigger picture. We think rear-projection systems offer the most bang for the buck for many users, while front-projection systems are the ultimate in big screen systems (think 100" diagonally). Hang your TV on the wall: Flat-screen TVs The hot item in the TV world today is the flat-screen TV. Similar to the screen of a notebook computer stretched to previously unimagined proportions, these new TVs use computer technologies such as LCD (liquid crystal diode) and plasma display systems to provide a large-screen television system that is usually only 4" or 5" deep. Hundreds of different models are on the market. You can find flat-screen TVs at big home-electronics stores and warehouse clubs, as well as in more mainstream stores such as Wal-Mart and Target. The first models were super expensive, often costing $12,000 to $15,000. Since then there’s been an explosion of manufacturers getting into the flat-panel TV game and prices have plummeted. Now you can easily find a 50" plasma HDTV for about $2000, only a few hundred dollars more than microprojection rear-projection TVs of the same size. You can also find smaller and cheaper flat-panel TVs for those parts of your home that don’t need (or can’t fit) a big TV. The market is almost overrun with inexpensive 20" to 30" LCD TVs that can fit anywhere in your home — and often double as PC monitors to boot.
Slide 105: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck 83 Making the plasma versus LCD decision As folks shop for flat-panel TVs, many are confused about the choice between plasma and LCD, particularly as LCD TVs get bigger and bigger and begin to encroach into plasma territory. (It used to be easy: If you wanted 50" or more, you got plasma; smaller than 42", you got LCD.) Well it is a difficult choice, but the good news is that you’re choosing between two very good alternatives. Putting aside the pricing and size for a moment (though you should consider those too), let’s look at the differences: Plasma TVs (and we’re speaking generally here) have better color reproduction, better blacks, a wider viewing angle (meaning you can sit farther to the side and still see a good picture) and a smoother picture during rapidly moving scenes (such as in sports). On the downside, they tend to be heavier, run hotter, use more electricity, and are often limited to 720p resolutions (which isn’t the end of the world, but more is always better when it comes to resolution). LCD TVs (again speaking generally) have higher resolutions, use less power and — most importantly to some folks — are not susceptible to burn-in (or image retention) when a static image (such as a video game) is on the screen for hours on end. Where LCD TVs fall down is in the viewing angle and in the response time (the measure of how quickly the picture changes on screen). These lines get blurrier every day. For example, 1080p plasmas are now available, and most plasmas are pretty much immune to burn-in when used with just a modicum of care (for example, not leaving the stock ticker on for three days straight). And LCDs are being designed with wider viewing angles and faster response times to improve their viewing experience. In the end, we still generally recommend plasma for really big flat panels (over 60") and LCD for the relatively smaller ones (37" and below). In between, we think the decision comes down to a TV-by-TV comparison rather than a technology-by-technology one. The two technologies in the flat screen world are Plasma: These TVs use a special grid of electrodes that excite a gas into a plasma state, putting off light. Plasma TVs typically start off at 42" (though some smaller models are on the market), and the sweet spot for plasma begins at about 50". Most plasma TVs are limited to a 720p resolution, though the first 1080p plasmas are hitting the market as we write this. LCD: The same LCD technology used in projection TVs and computer monitors has hit the TV market with a vengeance, and hundreds of manufacturers are offering LCD flat-panel TVs of different sizes. For the most part, the sweet spot in the market for LCD is TVs smaller than 42", but several manufacturers have begun to offer LCD TVs that compete headon with plasma in the 50" and above range. When comparing LCD to plasma, you will find that you pay a bit more for the same size screen, but you do get a full 1080p resolution.
Slide 106: 84 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center If you’re considering buying a flat screen, keep in mind that the same amount of money could buy a projection TV that’s bigger and (potentially) has a better picture. However, nothing is cooler than hanging your TV on the wall. Video source components Video source components are the magic black boxes that let you record or watch movies, play games, watch the baby, or even surf the Web on your home’s televisions. A huge number of video source components are on the market (and probably already in your home), including the following: VCR (videocassette recorders) PVR (personal video recorder) such TiVo or a PVR built into a cable or satellite set-top box, which uses a hard drive to record, store, and play back video Serving up media Over the past few years, the world of PCs and home-video and home-audio entertainment components have mixed in an exciting way. You can put a TV-tuner card in your PC and watch cable on it, or you can plug the PC into your TV and use its DVD player, online streaming video player, and MP3 jukebox to play back material on your audio/video network’s big screen and good speakers. Perhaps the neatest development of all, however, is the rise of PC technology-based media servers that store videos, music, digital pictures, and other content on a hard drive and then connect to both your PCs and audio/video systems. With a media server, you can watch videos, listen to audio, and look at any digital pictures on any display devices or networked audio systems in your house. PCs equipped with Media Center Edition software (Windows XP or Vista) are a great example of the current generation of media players, as are the multitude of MP3 audio jukebox devices that can store your CD collection on a computer hard drive. This initial generation of media servers sits next to your TV or audio amplifier and plays back media over that local connection — much like a DVD player or CD player does today. Request (www.request.com) uses the TV as the interface to these media servers and allows remote servers to synchronize so that you never have to worry that your favorite song is on the other server. But like stand-alone players, media servers can be incorporated in your homeentertainment network so you can use them anywhere in the house. Companies such as Apple Computer are also releasing media server devices, such as the newly announced Apple TV, which allows you to connect to your iTunes library on a Mac or PC to bring audio to your receiver and video to your TV over a networked connection. You can use the Apple TV to purchase and download movies from Apple’s iTunes Store and play them back on your computer or on your TV whenever and wherever you want. You can also build your own media server, using a fast PC with a big hard drive, the proper audio and video cards, and some specialized software. We talk about creating these PCs in Chapter 12.
Slide 107: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck PVRs are also often called DVRs (or digital video recorders) Laserdisc player (rare, but not quite gone yet) DVD (digital versatile disc or digital video disc) player — including the new high-definition variants, Blu-ray and HD-DVD In-home video devices such as a doorbell camera or a video baby monitor Video game machine PC (such as one outfitted with Windows XP or Vista Media Center Edition software) that can work as a PVR, an Internet content player, a DVD player, and more Most folks tend to view these kinds of video source devices as dedicated, one-room components. If you want to watch a movie on the DVD player, for example, you go to the room that has the DVD player. In a properly networked home, however, you can connect your video source devices to your video network and use them from any TV in the house. (We show you how in Chapters 6 and 7!) 85 TV Connections from the Outside World An important part of television is its capability to bring programming into your home from the world beyond. Like televisions themselves, these connections to the outside world are undergoing a series of major changes. New ways of receiving programming are becoming common, and established methods are revamping themselves for a digital world. Broadcast TV In spite of the proliferation of cable and satellite television and compact discs, old media such as broadcast television and radio are still alive and kicking. In addition, increasing consumer acceptance of DBS satellite television systems has resulted in a resurgence of demand for run-of-the-mill television antennas. Why? Unless you live in a big city, these systems might not carry programming from the big networks or local stations. If this scenario sounds familiar, you need to keep some level of cable television service or buy an antenna to watch local news or the local weather report. Another factor behind the survival — and resurgence — of the antenna is the transition to HDTV and digital broadcasting. Most folks in the United States can now pick up several free over-the-air HDTV broadcasts and, with an HDTV with a built-in tuner, get HDTV for the cost of an antenna and some cabling.
Slide 108: 86 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Luckily, television antennas have improved too, so without spending too much money, you can avoid the nightmare of fine-tuning a set of rabbit ears on top of your television. The two general categories of television antenna are Indoor antennas: These antennas sit on or near your television. Outdoor antennas: These antennas mount on your roof or alongside your DBS satellite dish. Whether your television antenna is outside or inside, you have to connect it to the TV. Most modern antennas use the same coaxial cable that cable television and DBS satellite systems use. (See Chapter 7 for strategies for wiring antennas into your video network.) Choosing the right antenna for your location can be complex. Luckily, an online resource will do it for you. Just point your Web browser to www. antennaweb.org and click the button that says Choose an Antenna. The system asks you a few questions about your location and the type of home you have (for example, a single story versus multiple story) and then calculates the type of antenna you need to buy. As a bonus, the system tells you exactly which digital broadcasts are available in your area, and even gets down to the level of detail of telling you which way to point your antenna (if you need to use a directional antenna to pick up faraway signals). The Antenna Web system uses a color-coding scheme that matches the color codes on the boxes of the antennas in the stores (or online), so you can simply find the color (or colors) you need when shopping. Cable TV The prevalence of cable service nationwide makes it an important part of any home-networking strategy — for both you and future owners of your home. And with the range of services offered by cable companies, you can get a lot more than television (Internet access and even telephone service, for example). The operation of a cable system is straightforward. A central office, or headend site (similar to the central equipment office of the telephone company), receives television signals from various sources (mainly from satellite feeds as well as local over-the-air broadcasts). Cable companies then assign the signals to specific channels and distribute them over a combination of fiberoptic and coaxial cables (which, coincidentally, make up the final portion of the network that enters your home). The two types of cable TV systems are analog systems and digital systems. In most parts of the United States, analog systems are being phased out in favor of digital systems, but this transition will take years to complete.
Slide 109: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck When your cable system goes totally digital, you will need either a digital settop box or a digital cable-ready TV (discussed in the upcoming “Digital cable” section) to receive TV stations in your home. 87 Analog cable The channel system for cable is different than the one for over-the-air broadcast television. Therefore, the frequency of, say, Channel 20 on a cable system is likely different than the frequency of Channel 20 in a broadcast environment. What this difference means to a you as a homeowner is that you can’t plug your cable TV feed into the back of any old television and expect it to work. Instead, you have two options: Cable-ready television set or VCR: You select a cable mode and then use the internal television tuner to decode and display the television signals. Most TVs made in the last few years are cable-ready, so all you have to do is plug the coaxial cable into the back of the TV and you’re set (after you run through the setup routines to set the time, add the channels, and so forth). Note: Cable-ready TVs do have a few disadvantages. Most of these sets can receive only a limited number of channels. Second, these sets probably can’t take advantage of special services from the cable company, such as digital cable, premium movie channels, and pay-per-view programs. Set-top box (or converter): These devices use a single broadcast channel (usually Channel 3 or 4) to feed the cable television signals to your television. With your television tuned to that single channel, you channel-surf through the set-top box. For digital cable services, which we discuss in a moment, you must use a set-top box or a special kind of cable-ready TV known as DCR, or digital cable ready. Digital cable Cable set-top services are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Most cable providers now offer a digital service, with two-way communications from the head end to the box and back again. The fancy set-top boxes used with these services have lots of extra built-in features, such as an onscreen program guide, reminder timers, VCR timers, and hard drives to store shows online for later viewing (PVR service, in other words). As an aside, this is an example of competition at work: When we wrote the first edition of this book, only DBS satellite systems offered this kind of neat TV functionality, but the cable companies responded to the threat and now match the DBS providers feature for feature. Most digital television signals sent over digital cable systems (which aren’t even all the channels you get — lower numbered channels are still sent in analog on most systems) are not ATSC, SDTV, or HDTV signals. They’re just NTSC signals transmitted digitally using a system called QAM (quadrature
Slide 110: 88 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center amplitude modulation — say that fast three times!). Most cable companies are sending at least a few HDTV channels to their customers, but the majority of channels are still old-fashioned NTSC. To tune into digital cable, you need one of the two following things: A digital set-top box: This is the modern-day equivalent of the cable converter, described in the previous section. Digital cable set-top boxes contain the QAM tuner that turns digital cable broadcasts into something your TV can display and the conditional access system that can unscramble premium channels. The digital set-top also includes an onscreen interface that lets you see a channel guide, program the PVR (if one is included), and select and view Video on Demand (VoD) programming. A digital cable-ready (or DCR) TV: A growing number of TVs, particularly HDTVs, include a QAM tuner that lets you plug directly into the cable TV feed to pick up analog and digital cable signals without a settop box — including HDTV signals. A smaller subset of these TVs include a device known as the CableCARD (see the sidebar titled “What’s the CableCARD all about?” for more on this), which handles the conditional access tasks so that you can view premium, scrambled channels without a set-top box. What’s the CableCARD all about? The CableCARD system is a smart card that you can rent from your cable company and plug into a special slot on CableCARD-equipped TVs (and even other devices, such as TiVo PVRs or — in the near future — CableCARD-equipped PCs. The CableCARD lets you decode (unscramble) premium channels without a set-top box. It makes for a nice, neat installation, with just a single coaxial cable running from the wall into your TV. Sounds great, huh? Well, there are problems. First, cable companies prefer to rent you a settop box, so support for the CableCARD (although it is mandated by law) is weak. Second, and more importantly, the CableCARD is a one-way system that doesn’t provide communications back to the cable company. So no onscreen program guide, no VoD, none of the fun new stuff that makes digital cable so attractive. There is good news on this front, however. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has mandated that cable companies use the CableCARD system within their own set-top boxes by July 2007, so development of a twoway CableCARD system that supports onscreen guides and VoD is well under way. We think that CableCARD, as it exists today, is fine for the bedroom TV, but not so great for the main hometheater room. When the 2.0 (two-way) version becomes available, we think it will be an interesting alternative to a digital cable set-top box.
Slide 111: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck 89 Satellite TV Millions of homeowners are cutting the cord to cable TV and installing satellite TV receivers. Satellite TV, especially the new, small-dish varieties, can provide high-quality video programming — with more channels than all but a handful of cable systems — to homes just about anywhere in the world. Direct broadcast satellite TV If you look around your neighborhood, you’ve no doubt noticed a profusion of small (18" to be exact), white or gray satellite dishes popping up on housetops. These are receiving dishes for direct broadcast satellite (DBS) television. Here’s what you get when you choose DBS: Channels galore: Depending on which service and service level you buy, you can get hundreds of channels. HDTV channels are increasingly a big part of what DBS providers are offering. Digital quality: DBS systems use MPEG-2 to transmit channels digitally, reducing interference. The majority of these channels are NTSC, not ATSC. Also, as with digital cable, a few of the channels are in HDTV. Both of the big satellite TV providers — DISH network and DIRECTV — are moving towards a newer version of MPEG: MPEG-4. This will allow even more channels (including local channels and hundreds of HDTV channels) to become available on their systems. If you have an older satellite receiver and dish, however, you’ll need to upgrade to pick up the new satellites broadcasting in MPEG-4 Audio channels: Plug into your stereo or home theater for audio-only programming. Easy-to-use graphical interfaces: Easy-to-view menus, with telephoneline access to providers for pay-per-view programming. Internet access: With a slightly different dish, you can also have highspeed Internet access, as we discuss in Chapter 13. As with everything, DBS has some downsides: You might not get local programming: In rural parts of the country, you still need a broadcast antenna or basic cable television service to view local channels and local news as well as broadcast (FOX, ABC, NBC, and CBS) programs.
Slide 112: 90 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center You need a receiver: The receiver acts like a digital cable converter box and converts the satellite’s digital television signals to signals that your television can understand. If you have more than one television, you may want additional receivers for each TV because, like a cable converter box, the receiver puts out only one channel at a time. (We tell you how to share a single receiver with multiple TVs — but keep in mind that you’ll be watching the same thing on each set.) You need an available telephone line: The receiver must be plugged into a telephone line to communicate with the DBS provider’s headquarters for billing and service provisioning. This can be your normal phone line, because the system typically talks to headquarters in the middle of the night when most of us are asleep. Digital cable, however, talks back to the head end over the cable line, so it doesn’t need that extra phone jack. You need to be able to “see” the satellite: You may have a hard time getting a satellite signal if you live in an area far away from the satellite’s orbit. If you live in upstate Maine, for instance, you may have more problems getting an EchoStar signal than a DIRECTV signal because of the satellite’s physical location. (In some cases, the dish has to be aimed so low towards the horizon that mountains and atmospheric clutter can get in the way.) You have to install the system: The system isn’t hard to install, but something about getting up on the roof conjures up visions of back surgery. Of course, you can mount the dish on the side of your house or put it in the yard. One company even makes nifty fake rocks that cover the dish and keep your neighbors happy. And a growing number of companies will do the installation for free. When we wrote the first edition of this book, DBS systems had a huge advantage over cable in terms of features and quality. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, cable companies have reacted to this competitive threat, and now digital cable systems provide most of the same bells and whistles: digital transmission (of at least some channels), onscreen programming guides, music channels, and so on. We like both systems. Compare prices and features in your town before you decide. One new feature is video on demand, which lets you watch movies (for a fee) like you watch VCR tapes and DVDs — you can pause, rewind, and fast forward. This feature is more prevalent (for technical reasons) with digital cable than with DBS, but DBS providers are experimenting with built-in PVRs to allow a similar service on their networks. Two competing DBS systems are currently on the market in the United States. Compare prices and services and choose the one you like best. As we write this, DIRECTV and EchoStar have agreed to a merger and are just awaiting regulatory approval. So don’t be surprised if there’s just one “choice” when you go shopping.
Slide 113: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck DIRECTV: DIRECTV (www.directv.com) uses an 18" dish (bigger for some locations and for receiving all the new MPEG-4 broadcasts) and the digital MPEG system to send its audio and video signals. A variety of companies manufacture the widely available DIRECTV hardware — and a few TV manufacturers incorporate DIRECTV receivers into their highend TVs. EchoStar, or the DISH network: EchoStar (www.dishnet.com) is similar to DIRECTV, using an 18" dish (or, like DIRECTV, bigger for local channels and MPEG-4) and digital MPEG encoding technology to transmit its video and audio. EchoStar sells their own receivers. If you live in Canada, you’re prohibited from getting DIRECTV or EchoStar service. These are legal prohibitions, not physical ones, because the satellite signals cover much of Canada. Bell Canada offers a similar system called ExpressVu (www.expressvu.com). 91 C Band The grandfather of today’s DBS satellite television systems is the C Band satellite system — those huge satellite dishes that used to sprout like monstrous mushrooms. At about seven feet across, the average C Band dish is expensive and difficult to place. Zoning restrictions keep C Band dishes out of many suburban areas, so you tend to see them only in rural areas. Still, in the early 1980s, having one of these dishes in your backyard meant that you could pick up channels from all over the world. Unfortunately, many of the channels that C Band systems once picked up for free are now encrypted, so you must subscribe to a service to receive them. The advent of DBS and almost universal access to cable television has severely limited the growth of the consumer C Band marketplace. These days, most C Band users are either satellite hobbyists or businesses, such as hotels. Many television networks and cable systems also use C Band systems to distribute programming. Satellites and your home If you decide to go with a satellite dish, you may run into some resistance from homeowner’s associations, neighborhood covenants, zoning laws, and the like. Don’t take this lying down — the FCC ruled in 2001 that these laws can’t be used to prevent you from installing a small dish (not a big C-band seven footer!). The only big exceptions are for safety (for example, you can’t be too close to a power line) and for homes in historic districts. Otherwise, no one can keep you from using a dish if you want to. Know your rights. Look online at http://www.fcc. gov/mb/facts/otard.html for the longwinded bureaucratese text of this ruling.
Slide 114: 92 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center C Band refers to the chunk of frequency spectrum allocated to these services. DBS satellite systems use the Ku band — though only hard-core satellite techie types call them Ku band systems. Audio Systems The other piece of the entertainment puzzle is an audio system — components that will play back your own music collection, radio, and the sound from movies, TV, and audio-only channels on cable and satellite systems. Today’s audio systems are designed to reproduce audio signals in high fidelity. In other words, the equipment should recreate the music so that it sounds like it did in the studio or concert hall where your favorite recordings were made. A high-fidelity sound system has several components: Source component: This component can be a CD player (or one of the new SACD or DVD audio players), a cassette deck, a radio tuner, a satellite tuner (such as an XM radio), an MP3 player or jukebox, or the audio portion of a video source such as a VCR, laser disc, or DVD. The source component produces a low-level audio signal — called a line-level signal — that’s usually transmitted over an RCA cable. Preamplifier or control amplifier: This device amplifies (or increases the power of) the line-level signal and also serves as a switching device to allow you to select from different source components. The preamplifier also contains a volume control, which determines how much the signal is amplified. The control amplifier connects through another interconnect cable (or internal wiring if you’re using an integrated amplifier) to the next stage in the sound reproduction process. Power amplifier: This unit adds more power to the audio signal — enough power to make your audio signal audible through the speakers. The preamplifier doesn’t have enough power to drive your speakers. (Yes, we know it sounds silly to have two amplifiers, but that’s just how it is.) Note: An integrated amplifier is a preamplifier and a power amplifier integrated into one component. Add a radio tuner to this box, and you have a receiver. Loudspeakers: Connected to the amplifier by speaker cables (what else?), the speakers use electromagnets to move sound drivers — the woofer and tweeter — back and forth. This movement, which corresponds with the audio signal coming from the amplifier, pushes the air in front of the drivers rhythmically, creating the sound waves that you
Slide 115: Chapter 5: Breaking the Entertainment Bottleneck hear. Loudspeakers can range from a full surround-sound five- or sevenspeaker home-entertainment center to remote speakers in your kitchen or dining room to the intercom speakers throughout your house. As audio systems expand from a single room to multiple rooms, a new breed of component has come onto the marketplace — the multizone system. Traditional audio systems have always been single zone, meaning that the control portion of the preamplifier — the switches that let you select which audio source you want to listen to — lets you select only one source at a time. This is fine for a stereo system that you’re using in only one room (you can’t really listen to more than one thing at once, right?), but this solution lacks flexibility for multiple rooms. Newer, multizone systems have control sections that let you select more than one source component at once. You and your spouse can listen to a Dunne Roman CD in the living room and your kids can “emo” out to Fall Out Boy in the basement. As we mentioned, if you want to use a multizone system, you need additional amplifiers — one for each independent source that you want to play back at one time. 93 Intercom Systems Unlike a stereo system, an intercom system isn’t designed with the highest audio quality in mind. Its main function is to get your voice from point A to point B without weakening or incurring interference. Intercoms aren’t cheap or unsophisticated; they just have a different mission. Intercoms fall into two main categories: Wireless systems: These intercoms use radio transceivers (transmitter and receiver) to carry voice signals from room to room. Just install a simple device on your desk, raise the antenna (and do the same with the other device), and you’re ready to communicate. Variations on this theme include fixed wireless intercoms (which you can mount on the wall), portable baby monitors, and many cordless phones that use a speakerphone on the base station to create a simple, point-to-point intercom system. Wired systems: As the name implies, these intercoms are wired together and send your voice as an electrical audio signal between rooms. Wired intercom systems run the gamut from simple voice systems to advanced audio systems that can also carry radio and other audio signals. Figure 5-3 shows a typical wired intercom system. Some telephone systems have intercom systems; these are covered in more detail in Chapter 10.
Slide 116: 94 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Intercoms can be a useful feature (though phone networks can serve a similar function). Danny finds his intercom useful in his four-story house. The Fisher Price monitor that he and his wife used with the first set of twins has been replaced with a simple press of the Monitor button on the Nursery intercom unit. The babies’ cries can now be heard all over the house. (Wait, is that good?) Remote unit CD player A le RC cab eo t e r ec St onn c er int Door intercom 4-conductor shielded cable Master unit 4-c on 4-conductor shielded cable Remote unit du r cto Figure 5-3: “Calling all stations. This is Mom in the living room. Get down here NOW!” Most decent intercom systems have an audio in source option, too, whereby you can plug your home-entertainment system into your intercom system. By tying the two together, you save yourself money. As you map your wiring runs, keep in mind that many intercom manufacturers void your warranty if you don’t use their proprietary wiring systems. However, using their wiring is more expensive and goes against the idea of a uniform backbone over which all communications travel. sh iel de Remote unit dc ab le
Slide 117: Chapter 6 Getting Video Where You Want It In This Chapter Choosing between base or broad Going the distance Getting the most with coaxial cable Doing the modulate thing ou can wire gobs of capabilities into a video network — a much greater variety of choices than is possible in most other networks we discuss (such as data networks or phone networks). That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have to hold the number of pages in this book to less than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica, so we can’t go into all the possible choices. On second thought, maybe that’s good news, too, because rather than confusing you with a laundry list of all the different video possibilities and boring you with technical drivel on this super-video whatsit and that video-switching doodad, we concentrate on showing you how to wire the most common video network features. These features include the following: Coaxial video outlets in all rooms that may one day contain a television In-home video connections in rooms that may contain video sources, from VCRs to baby-monitor cameras Inputs for cable television and a broadcast TV antenna Provisions for adding a DBS satellite system to the network A central distribution node tying all this good stuff together These devices, taken together, make up the video backbone in your smart home. The network we lay out for you uses broadband RF video distribution (whew!), which means most of your video is being distributed as “channels” of video that are picked up by TV tuners at various locations in your home. This type of distribution network takes care of the broadcast, cable, and satellite TV signals coming into your home and gets them to your TVs. Y
Slide 118: 96 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center For in-home sources of video such as surveillance cameras or video sources that you want to share with other rooms such as DVD players, you can create your own TV stations that bring those signals from one point to another. The traditional approach for such in-home TV stations has the use of special devices called video modulators, which send the signals from video sources (such as VCRs or security cameras) through the wires in your walls and broadcast them on TV channels not used by your local or cable TV stations. Just tune to the right channel — like you tune to Channel 3 for your VCR — and you can watch these sources anywhere in your house. Unfortunately, for folks with digital cable or satellite systems, modulators don’t always work reliably — or at all — because there simply aren’t any empty channels available to use for your in-home sources. In Chapter 7 we talk about some systems that use wireless or CAT-5e/6 cabling (the cable used for computer networks) to get your video around the house. In this chapter and the next, we take you through the process of wiring a home-video network backbone. Distance Counts in Video Signals You can get video signals from place to place in two basic ways: baseband distribution and broadband distribution. The difference between these two methods is in the amount of information that the cable carries. A baseband transmission carries only a single channel of video, so you generally use baseband cable for the connections between video components such as your DVD player and TV. Generally, baseband cables are short. Broadband (or RF — radio frequency) systems (such as coaxial cable used for antennas or cable TV), on the other hand, are designed to carry many video channels over greater distances. Cabling between components (A/V interconnect cables) Baseband video is the distribution of a single channel or program over a cable. The Video Out port on the back of VCRs, cable converters, satellite receivers, DVD and laserdisc players, and camcorders are baseband video signals, as are the S-video ports of the same devices (we discuss S-video in more detail shortly). In general, baseband video distribution is best suited for connections over a short distance, such as between components in the same room. Baseband video uses video patch cables to connect components in a system and requires audio patch cables to carry the corresponding audio signals — because you need both sets of cables, we refer to this set of cables as A/V interconnect cables.
Slide 119: Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It Home systems commonly use three types of analog A/V interconnect video cables (which we list from least sophisticated to most sophisticated): Composite video: This connection system is on all video source devices. Composite video carries all components of an NTSC video signal over a single wire and connects devices using standard RCA or phono plugs — the same type of plugs used to connect stereo components such as CD players and amplifiers. See Figure 6-1. (For more on NTSC, the standard U.S. television system, see Chapter 5.) S-video: You find S-video on more sophisticated VCRs and on DVD players, DBS dishes, digital cable boxes, as well as on many camcorders. This method uses a single cable with multiple conductors to carry the brightness and color parts of a video signal separately, resulting in a better picture. See Figure 6-2. Component video: The majority of DVD players and most new televisions have component connections, usually in addition to composite and S-video connections. (You also find component video connections on some digital TV receivers — it’s one of the most common ways of carrying HDTV signals to an HDTV.) Component video breaks down the video signal into three parts, each carried on a separate cable. This breakdown lets you avoid much of the internal circuitry in both your DVD player and your TV, so you get a better picture. At least that’s what all of the videophiles we know tell us. You can see component video connectors in Figure 6-3. 97 Figure 6-1: Composite video connector. S VIDEO OUT Figure 6-2: S-video connector.
Slide 120: 98 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Figure 6-3: Component video connectors. Y Pb Pr When more than one of these options is available to you, always choose the most sophisticated. If your source and TV both have component video, use that. Most of these source devices also have an RF (antenna cable) output that works on Channel 3 or 4 of your TV, but you should consider this choice only as a last resort because the video quality will most likely be lower than one of the baseband connections. In the digital video — HDTV — world, some digital video interconnects can replace the rat’s nest of wires (up to nine of them) connecting digital TV receivers, DVD players, and other high-definition sources (such as the Sony Playstation 3 gaming console) to HDTV monitors. Several competing efforts are underway to standardize connectors and incorporate a DRM (digital rights management — or copy protection) system. Following are the leading candidates in the fight for standardized digital interconnection of video equipment: DVI, or Digital Video Interconnect: This is a familiar connection to most PC owners, because DVI has been an option for connecting PCs to monitors for some time. In the TV world, a variant of DVI called DVD-D is included on many HDTVs and source devices (such as DVD players). DVI connections used in the TV world include a copy protection scheme called HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection), which is designed to keep users from making unauthorized copies of a program. DVI is being slowly but surely phased out in new home-entertainment gear in favor of HDMI, discussed next. HDMI, or High-Definition Multimedia Interface: HDMI is, for all intents and purposes, a souped-up, supercharged replacement for DVI. HDMI is unique among all A/V interconnect technologies we discuss here because it carries both video and audio signals over a single cable. In addition, HDMI, unlike the other AV interconnects, can carry the highest quality HDTV signals (called 1080p). Like DVI, HDMI includes the HDCP copy protection (or should we say, prevention) system. Figure 6-4 shows an HDMI connector. FireWire, or IEEE 1394 (or one of many other brand names): This is a more open, computer-like interface that isn’t included on most TVs or video source devices, but a few manufacturers do use FireWire. It’s most commonly found on PCs and Macs and on video cameras and is used to connect these devices to each other.
Slide 121: Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It 99 Figure 6-4: The HDMI cable and connector is your HDTV choice. Digital video connections such as HDMI are great — they offer both convenience and the utmost in picture quality. But digital video connections have some gotchas. That’s because content owners — the TV and movie studios — want tight control over the Digital Rights Management (DRM) aspect of digital entertainment. Because you can make bit-for-bit perfect copies of digital material, they’re pushing their own digital interconnect technologies that incorporate strong encryption and authentication techniques. These schemes tend to tie the material to a specific format and device, so they may keep you from using the media in a different way — such as playing it on your computer or recording it to watch in the bedroom or your vacation house. Keep an eye on these standards as you shop for an HDTV. For most folks, HDMI is the connection of choice for HDTVs, but a few manufacturers are still pushing FireWire. Within the realm of HDMI, there are some variants — HDMI Version 1.3 is the latest version as we write in early 2007, and if you have the choice, it’s the way to go. Cabling the video-distribution network (broadband) A broadband (or RF) video-distribution system combines many different video signals — and their corresponding audio signals — onto a single cable by modulating the signals onto different radio frequencies, or channels. In simplest terms, this process involves dividing the available bandwidth of a cable into equal parts (channels), and then placing the information representing the video program into one of these channels by varying the electrical signal in some standard way (this is the actual modulation). These frequency divisions correspond to the standard channels on your television, which has an internal tuner that demodulates the signal and displays it on the screen. Figure 6-5 shows how program signals are assigned by broadcasters or cable service providers to different frequencies (channels) and sent over the same cable.
Slide 122: 100 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Channel 12 Channel 116 Figure 6-5: Modulating multiple channels onto different radio frequencies. 50 100 Frequency in MHz 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600 650 700 750 800 850 900 6 MHz between channels Broadcast and cable networks modulate multiple channels. (In the case of broadcast, the modulation doesn’t use up bandwidth on a cable but rather divides the over-the-air radio frequency spectrum into smaller parts). Just about all video source devices include a broadband output — usually switchable between Channel 3 and Channel 4. An internal modulator converts the baseband video signal into a modulated video signal, and allows you to connect the source to older televisions that don’t have baseband video inputs. Coaxial Video Networks Although you can create a video network without running cables (as described in Chapter 7), running cables for your network almost always increases performance, flexibility, and capacity. Wireless alternatives are usually more expensive than their cabled partners, and they do less. Bottom line: Anytime you can build a video network by running wires, we recommend that you do so. The wired version of a video network is one that distributes video signals (separated into different channels) over coaxial cable to each television in your home. If you’ve had cable TV, you’ve had a network similar to what we describe, except that traditional cable TV networks have been paltry, oneway video networks in comparison to the two-way video-distribution system that we describe. Cable-modem broadband services run on coaxial cable. Because they send data in two directions — as do the new digital cable set-top boxes — cable modems affect your coaxial video network design. We discuss the implications of these technologies as we go through building a network in Chapter 7.
Slide 123: Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It 101 Coaxial cable Coaxial cable — usually called coax — is a metallic cable most often used for transmitting radio frequency (RF) signals such as broadband television video and radio signals. Coaxial cable has two conductors, or axes, that carry data. A layer of dielectric insulating material surrounds a single center conductor. The other conductor is a metal shield that goes around the dielectric (insulating) layer. The outermost layer of coax cable is an insulating jacket. Coaxial cables are rated by their impedance, which is basically the AC version of electrical resistance. Different applications require different impedances. In the home, almost all systems that require coaxial cable use 75-ohm impedance coax, although some computer LAN systems (older ones, not commonly found in the home) use 50-ohm coax. (Ohm is the unit of measurement for impedance.) Table 6-1 lists the three main type of coaxial cable found in homes. Table 6-1 Coaxial Cable Type Unrated 75-ohm coax Video Coaxial Cable Grades Cost Lowest Use Older cable TV installations and aerial antenna-to-TV connections Cable TV and antenna-to-TV connections Comments This low grade of coaxial cable suffers from high resistance to the video signal and provides poor picture quality. Not recommended for video networks. This is the standard grade of coaxial cable found in most existing installations, suitable for standard cable TV and broadcast antenna use. This is the highest grade of coaxial cable found in the home. It provides the best resistance from interference and the least amount of signal degradation. Required for DBS and cable-modem installations and recommended for all new installations. RG-59 coax Medium RG6 coax Highest Cable TV, DBS, and cable-modem connections
Slide 124: 102 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center You may encounter coaxial cables labeled RG6QS or RG6 Quad Shield, which means that the cable has four layers of additional shielding beneath the cable jacket. These layers provide additional protection from external interference. The difference between RG-59 and RG6QS is similar to the difference between CAT-3 and CAT-5e/6 UTP cables, which we discuss in Chapters 11 and 15. They look similar and do similar things, but the higher-rated cable is a bit more capable of carrying your signals cleanly — and for longer distances. The price difference is minimal, and we strongly recommend that you choose RG6QS for your coaxial cabling needs; the small extra cost ensures that your wiring can handle the future needs of your network. In fact, applications such as DBS require RG6QS and specifically tell you not to use RG-59. Coax connectors Like almost all the networking cable we cover, coaxial cables use standardized connectors. Residential applications use only one type of connector — the F connector, which is shown in Figure 6-6. If you have cable television, you’re already familiar with this screw or push-on connector. Female F connector RG6 coax without F connector Figure 6-6: RG6 coaxial cable and F connectors. Male F connector Like most connectors, F connectors come in male and female versions. In general, female connectors are on video equipment and wall outlets, and male connectors are used to attach the cables to these outlets. Components The cable and connectors are the permanent parts of your video-network infrastructure — the parts that you put in your walls and expect to keep there for 20 years or so. The other components that your video network
Slide 125: Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It needs, such as distribution panels and modulators, will probably be less permanent members of your household electronic family. Over time, your network needs may change and new technologies such as digital television will become available, precipitating changes in some of your network components. These changes will cost money (the price of progress?), but the main part of your investment — namely the materials and labor used in installing the coaxial cabling in your walls — will remain intact and useful. 103 Outlets If you’re like us, you don’t want coaxial cables and F connectors dangling out of holes in the wall. Luckily, an assortment of coaxial cable in-wall outlets fit into standard electrical junction boxes and use standard faceplates. Dozens of companies manufacture these outlets, which come in many combinations and sizes. If your budget allows, we recommend running two RG6 cables to each room. The first coaxial cable allows you to receive video signals from an external source such as cable TV. The second lets you send out video signals — from devices such as DVD players or baby monitors — to the rest of the home. You might not want to run two cables to every spot in your home, but certain areas will require that you do. A coaxial outlet for this cabling consists of two female F connectors, one above the other, in a compact, single-gang junction box. Single-gang means that the Dalton boys don’t ride with Jesse James. Okay, gang simply refers to the size of the box and cover. For reference, a single-gang junction box is the same size as a typical two-receptacle electrical outlet or a single light switch. Many twin coaxial outlets have large faceplate openings and use a standardsized faceplate called a Leviton Decora. (These are the same faceplates accompanying large light switches in many newer homes.) As you design your home networks, you may find that you want to put several different kinds of outlets together on a wall — speaker connections for an audio network, a phone line or two, and your coaxial outlets, for example. Consider using a larger double- or triple-gang junction box and installing a multipurpose outlet that can terminate all these cables in one place. Most major outlet manufacturers make all sorts of combination outlets. Low-voltage signals such as coaxial video networks don’t get along with AC power lines. You should keep at least three feet between the two to avoid noise and interference. Never try to connect your coaxial lines and power lines in the same junction box — the result is a mess. If you’re building a house, make sure that the electrical and communications cables are not through the same holes in the studs — some contractors do this, thinking that it’s compact and tidier.
Slide 126: 104 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Distribution panel The key component in your video network is the distribution panel. This device is the central node for your video network — all coaxial lines to the various rooms of your house begin here. A distribution panel has several functions: It accepts one or optimally more coaxial, broadband, or video signal input. It combines these input signals into a unified broadband output. It splits this output to feed multiple video endpoints (in other words, televisions). It amplifies the outgoing signals to make them stronger (because splitting the signal weakens it). Figure 6-7 shows a typical video-distribution panel. Internal lines In from rooms with modulators Inputs from modulators External lines Outputs to TVs To TVs Inputs from CATV/Antenna Figure 6-7: The distribution panel is the center of a From antenna or cable feed video network. Note: All cables are RG6 coax with F connectors. When you’re shopping for a video-distribution panel, look for the following: Number of inputs: Choose a unit that has at least two (and preferably more) inputs. Doing so allows you to take a local video source (such as a DVD player) and distribute its signals throughout your home, instead of to the nearest TV. To A/C power
Slide 127: Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It Number of outputs: Each television that you want to connect to your video network needs its own output on the distribution panel. These panels are engineered to maintain the proper signal strength and quality when used in a “one television per outlet” way. If you try to cheat and use a coaxial splitter to connect an extra television to a single output, you’re throwing away the design and engineering expertise that went into the panel, and you probably won’t be happy with the results. Most panels have from 5 to 12 outputs, so you should be able to satisfy your home’s needs without having to install a second panel. Distribution panels are often described as 3 x 8 or 5 x 12. The first number is the number of inputs, the second is the number of outputs. Amplification: To maintain a signal that’s strong enough to produce a good television picture, you need to amplify the signal. Most distribution panels have built-in amplifiers that take care of this for you. Sophisticated models have different levels of amplification so that some outputs are optimally amplified for shorter cable runs, and others are optimized for longer runs. Why different levels of amplification? Because overamplifying a signal is almost as bad as underamplifying it. Panels that have different tiers of amplification typically have several outputs designated for short distances (0 to 50 feet, for example) and some for longer runs (perhaps for 50 to 150 feet). Models with several outputs (such as the 5-x-12 panel) may even have a middle tier of distance ranges. If you’re using a digital cable service, make sure you chose a bidirectional video-distribution panel. Many older-design distribution panels don’t let signals flow back through them onto the cable network. Because digital cable set-top boxes communicate back to the cable network, you need to choose a distribution panel that will let them do this! You can also find distribution panels with a cable-modem bypass that lets you keep your cable modem out of the loop — further reducing the possibility of your distribution panel’s amplifier causing interference and slowing down your Web surfing. 105 More than you ever wanted to know about modulators After the RG6 cabling and multiple-input distribution panel are in place, you have the makings of a two-way, whole-home video network. Now you just need an easy way to select the source you want to watch. That’s where modulators come in. A modulator translates a source’s baseband video and audio signals into a standard TV RF channel — just like the ones that broadcast and cable companies send you. So that they don’t interfere with existing channels, modulators must be frequency agile. In other words, instead of transmitting on only a single frequency, modulators must be capable of transmitting over a range of frequencies (or TV channels), so that you can adjust them to an open channel on your system.
Slide 128: 106 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Following is a typical scenario for modulator use. Suppose that you have a main VCR in the living room, a baby monitor in the nursery, and a PVR and a DBS satellite receiver in your home-theater room. You want to be able to view any of these signals on any TV in the house. No problem. You just need a modulator that can modulate four inputs onto different channels on your coaxial cable, so that they’re available at each jack in the house. Perhaps Channel 87 is the baby monitor, Channel 89 is the VCR, Channel 91 is the PVR, and Channel 93 is the satellite receiver. When you want to watch one of these devices somewhere else in the house, you tune to the appropriate TV station. Simple! You probably have several modulators already: in your VCR, in your DVD player, in your laserdisc player, or in your DSS receiver. However, these modulators give you only two choices — Channel 3 or 4. Their sole purpose is to provide a means of connecting these devices to televisions that lack separate, baseband A/V inputs. In most television networks, Channels 3 and 4 aren’t unoccupied, so these modulators make use of an internal switch (the VCR/TV button on your VCR’s remote) that disconnects the antenna or cable feed to the TV, preventing interference with existing channels. Chances are that you won’t be able to use these Channel 3 and 4 modulators for distributing video throughout the home because your coax will have existing cable or over-the-air channels. (The VCR/TV switch works for a TV connected directly to the device but doesn’t work for the whole house.) Even in the unlikely event that you don’t have existing channels on Channels 3 or 4, building a Channel 3/4 modulator into a source device won’t do much for a whole-home network because you can add only one source device for the entire house. You can’t modulate more than one device onto a single TV channel. And even if Channels 3 and 4 are unoccupied, modulators shouldn’t be used on adjacent channels. Think about the following when you’re choosing a modulator: Digital or analog: Analog modulators are much cheaper than digital ones, but they usually aren’t as flexible in the frequencies you can choose from, so you have to buy a modulator that is factory-set to the channel you have available. Analog models tend to drift off stations just like those old dial radios did, requiring frequent readjustment. Digital models, though more expensive, are more reliable and accurate; you basically set them once and forget them. Single or multichannel: You can buy modulators that translate a single video source onto a single television channel, or you can buy ones that translate up to four separate input sources onto four different output channels. A multichannel unit may better serve your needs for two reasons: • A multichannel unit allows you to distribute the video signals from several collocated video sources (such as in a home-theater room) throughout your whole house.
Slide 129: Chapter 6: Getting Video Where You Want It • With a multichannel modulator, you eliminate the confusion and complexity of using coaxial splitters to increase the number of internal video inputs on your distribution panel. Mono, stereo, or no audio: Most modulators transmit the audio output of your source device as monaural audio — no stereo separation, no surround sound, just mono (the same thing out of both speakers). Even if they have two inputs (for left and right channel audio), they’re probably mono. You can buy modulators that transmit MTS (the stereo system that TVs use), but they cost significantly more. If you’re installing a modulator that will be carrying the video from a surveillance camera, you can save money by purchasing a modulator that has no sound input. Shape and size: Modulators don’t come in a standard shape and size. You can choose from the following options: • Black box: These modulators don’t look pretty, but they will fit in with the rest of the stuff on your A/V equipment shelf. • Wall outlet size: Much less obtrusive are modulators that fit in a standard wall outlet gang box. The same size as a light switch (or a coaxial outlet), these miracles of miniaturization make sense for places where you don’t have a huge rack of video equipment in place. • Distribution panels: You can get modulators out of the room entirely by purchasing an all-in-one distribution panel that has a modulator or two built right into the same box. This option limits you because your source devices must be close to the distribution panel — that VCR on the third floor is out of luck! Loop-through capability: Many modulators offer something called an A/V loop through. Many source devices — except for some DBS receivers and DVD players — have only one set of baseband video and audio outputs. If you plug these into a modulator, you don’t have any way to make a baseband A/V connection to the local TV — you have to use the source’s built-in Channel 3/4 modulator instead. The loop through provides an extra set of baseband video and audio outputs on the back of the modulator so you can connect to the local TV directly using composite or S-video cables, instead of using the modulated signal routed back through the distribution panel. When you’re using a modulator system to create your own TV channels in your home, keep the following points in mind: Install a signal amplifier between your antenna and the distribution panel or modulators: When you create your own TV channel, you’re doing pretty much the same thing in your house that cable companies and broadcasters do at their head-end offices and stations. If you’re using an antenna feed to receive broadcast TV stations, you could end 107
Slide 130: 108 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center up sending your video out your antenna and over the airwaves (and into your neighbor’s TV perhaps). The FCC doesn’t like this idea, so it requires you to install a signal amplifier between your antenna and the distribution panel or modulators. Amplifiers are inherently one-way — signals don’t pass back through them — and they help pick up those distant stations better. Bidirectional amplifiers let signals go both ways, but the ones going back upstream to the cable company are lowfrequency signals that won’t interfere with television channels. Skip channels between modulated channels: Most modulator manufacturers recommend that you skip at least one channel between modulated channels to avoid interference. Be aware of signal interference: Channels that your TV can’t pick up may still be strong enough to interfere with your internal channels — this is often the case in the higher UHF band for broadcast TV. The same can apply to cable TV — just because you don’t subscribe to a particular channel doesn’t mean that its signal isn’t taking up bandwidth space on your coax. If this problem occurs, adjust the modulator to a different channel. Make sure you have free channel space: Channel space isn’t much of a problem if you use an antenna — even the most crowded urban areas have plenty of unused channels. However, cable service providers in many areas are beginning to saturate their available channels with programming. They’re also using TV channels for other services, such as cable modems and audio services. So if you’re planning on modulating several channels onto your network, do your homework and make sure you’ll be able to find open channels. You can do this by physically looking at channels you think are unused on one of your televisions (making sure a scrambled signal isn’t there) and by checking the complete listing of channels provided by your cable service provider.
Slide 131: Chapter 7 Wiring a Video Network In This Chapter Cabling and connecting to create a video network Integrating a satellite system into your whole-home network Leveraging your CAT-5e network Plugging into wireless and phone line alternatives n Chapters 5 and 6, we spend a fair amount of time talking about all the pieces and parts that fit into a video-distribution network. That’s important stuff to know — but it doesn’t do you much good if you don’t have everything connected properly. So in this chapter, we tell you about the model to use in setting up your network. The technical term for this model is topology or network architecture, but don’t be intimidated. These words just mean a way of thinking about your network so that you know what to connect where. We tell you how to get the right cables in the walls (and how to buy the right infrastructure devices) to create a futureproof, two-way video network. Maybe you don’t plan to install all the equipment that we describe in Chapters 5 and 6 right away. No problem. As long as you get your wires in place, the general network model that we describe in this chapter will serve you well as your needs change and grow in the future. Don’t feel like you have to wire a video network (or any network) yourself. If you’re hesitant about drilling holes and running cables through your walls, do yourself a favor and hire a professional. The discussion of video networks and especially that of modulators is probably the toughest in the book. You might need to reread some sections a few times. That’s okay. We get confused here too. Stick with it, because video entertainment is the heart of your smart home. Another warning to you — and again it’s a warning about modulators. Many folks have digital cable or satellite TV systems as their main source of “outside the home” video programming. These systems make it very difficult, if not impossible, to use modulators as a technique for distributing “inside the I
Slide 132: 110 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center home” video sources. If you have one of these systems as your TV source, we recommend that you look at other alternatives, such as video-over-CAT-5 cabling or wireless, for in-home distribution. We talk about these systems in the second half of this chapter. Connecting Your Video Network The fundamental building block of your video network is the coaxial cable. We recommend that you build your whole-home video network with two segments of RG6 coaxial cable connected to each video outlet that you install in your major rooms — one cable that brings video into the TV and one cable that allows you to distribute video source devices (such as VCRs) through the network. Specifically, you should have at each location: An external video connection: This connection carries video signals from your distribution panel to your television. Think of external as outbound. An internal video connection: This connection carries video signals from any source devices in the room back to the distribution panel, where they can be combined with your external video source (cable or broadcast TV) and sent back out on the outbound lines. Think of internal as inbound. Note: We use the words external and internal in reference to the central hub of the video network, the video distribution panel. External, or outbound, means away from the video distribution panel, and internal, or inbound, means toward the video distribution panel. Consider running four RG6 cables (two double outlets) to your home office and your media room or home-theater room. You might need the extra capacity or you might decide you want to rearrange the furniture. (It sure helps to have an identical set of outlets on the other side of the room when you switch the sofa and the TV to opposite walls.) Running just one outbound coaxial cable allows you to receive signals in that room and may be sufficient for rooms in which you don’t intend to send any video sources back through the network. However, it’s hard to predict which rooms will fall into that category. Figure 7-1 shows the layout of a typical, centrally connected, coaxial video network. In the next sections, we walk you through the network, from a single room back to the distribution panel.
Slide 133: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network 111 Modulator A/V interconnect Room 1 DVD RG6 RG6 TV Wall outlet with two female F connectors Room 2 Antenna TV RG6 In from CATV/Antenna RG6 Amplifier Input 2 Input 1 In from CATV/Antenna Figure 7-1: A video network that runs to a central distribution panel. RG6 Dist. panel AC power Out to TVs If you use digital cable and also want to use modulated sources, building a video network can get complicated. Digital cable systems do some funky things with their signals and use up a lot more of the frequency spectrum. So you’ll have a hard time even finding a free channel to modulate your source devices onto. In the “Dealing with digital cable” sidebar, we talk about some ways to get around this problem.
Slide 134: 112 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Dealing with digital cable Digital cable is a great service. Tons of channels, a neat on-screen program guide, and more. Unfortunately, the sheer number of channels and the different channel structure used by digitally transmitted channels (typically, the lower channels are still transmitted in analog) make it hard to find empty slots in the bandwidth in which to insert your modulated programming. Even if you find an empty channel, there’s no guarantee that it will stay open — cable providers constantly add channels and reshuffle their lineups. To make things more complicated, the channel numbers you see on your digital cable set-top box (for example, 200 for HBO) don’t equate to the channel numbers you select on your modulator. If you have digital cable and want to use a twoway, modulated video network, you can try the following: Talk to your cable company: Ask the installer or call the technical support line — see whether they’ll identify some open channels for you. Use a notch filter to block out a chunk of channels: This isn’t an elegant solution. Notch filters block multiple channels (often five to ten), not just one. So you might lose access to some channels you want. Notch filters start at around $70 to $80, and the price goes up rapidly as the width of the notch (the number of channels being blocked) gets smaller because blocking fewer channels is more difficult. Separate the digital cable signals onto a different RG6: This scenario is similar to how satellite TV signals are incorporated into a video network (discussed in the “Special Needs of Satellite Systems” section). You’d need a third RG6 cable for locations using a digital cable set-top box. Instead of being connected to your distribution panel, these cables would be patched together in a physically separate network (using a splitter from the cable company or another distribution panel). Modulated video from in-house sources would then be distributed over the other two RG6 cables. Skip the modulation and use a different network to distribute internal video sources: We describe these systems at the end of the chapter (video over CAT-5e, wireless, and phone lines). We think the last two approaches are the best ways to go. And using a good installer — someone who’s familiar with your local cable company — can really pay off. As we discuss in Chapter 6, digital cable set-top boxes and cable modems need to send data back upstream to your cable company. You might wonder if internal RG6 cables can carry this data — the answer is no. Cable modem and digital cable upstream data goes back up the external cable. The key here is to buy a video distribution panel that is labeled bidirectional and that allows data to pass back through the amplifier and onto the cable provider’s network. Look for these words on the manual: a 5 to 42 MHz return path.
Slide 135: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network 113 Where does HDTV fit in? High-definition TV (HDTV). The mere words make us smile. Widescreen TV images with film quality. Is your video network going to be ready for it? Or for any of the new digital television (DTV) variants we discuss in Chapter 5? In most cases, the answer is yes (aren’t you glad?). DTV signals are compatible with the standard RF infrastructure (RG6 cabling) that carries today’s NTSC signals. The only thing to keep in mind is that many over-the-air DTV broadcasts use higher frequencies and have larger variations in signal strengths than do regular broadcast and cable TV stations. So to handle HDTV, you must have a high-quality distribution panel and amplifiers. The major vendors of these systems — such as Channel Plus (www.channelplus.com) or Leviton (www. leviton.com) — offer amplifiers and distribution panels that are HDTV capable, and they often clearly label them so (using an official DTV logo authorized by the ATSC — the group that sets the standards for DTV). Modulators are a different story. They’re designed to work with yesterday’s NTSC analog TV standard. As new video source devices (such as digital VCRs or high-definition DVDs) are developed to record or display HDTV/DTV pictures, your existing modulators won’t be able to do anything with those signals. In the longterm, you’ll probably need to replace your modulators. By then, there will be modulators designed to deal with HDTV signals. Filling your walls: Running the cables When wiring a video-distribution network, the first task is to run two RG6 coaxial cables between the distribution panel and each area of the house where you want video outlets. You’ll probably want to hire a professional cable installer to run this cable for you. For an attractive appearance, the cables should connect to wall-mounted female coaxial connectors, as described in Chapter 6. To make connection and future system changes easier, label your RG6 cables. At a minimum, you need to know which room the cable is coming from and whether it’s the internal or external line. (Nothing inherent about a cable makes it internal or external — it’s just the logical use you apply to the cable.) We recommend that you buy RG6 cable in two colors (it usually comes in white or black); use one color for all internal runs and the other for all external runs. Tying it together: Making connections at the distribution panel If you do everything right when completing the steps in the preceding section, you should have a gob of cables running into a central point, which we call the
Slide 136: 114 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center central wiring closet (see Chapter 2 for more info on the wiring closet). Here’s how to connect these wires to your distribution panel to complete your network: 1. Connect each external RG6 coaxial cable to one of the distribution panel’s external female connection interfaces. If your distribution panel comes with multiple levels of amplification, take the time now to double-check the amplification levels. Each of your meticulously labeled cables should be connected to outputs with amplification levels that correspond to the distance of each cable run. (Check the manufacturer’s recommendations — often each output has a recommended distance label right next to where the cable plugs in.) 2. Connect each internal RG6 cable into one of the modulator inputs (sometimes labeled local) on your distribution panel. You may find that you have more internal video cables in your wiring closet than you have inputs (remember that most panels have five or fewer inputs). If you don’t have any video sources connected to a particular cable, you can leave it disconnected — but well labeled — until you need it. If you still don’t have enough inputs on your panel, you can use a good quality splitter/combiner to connect two or more internal cables to a single panel input. If you choose this option, don’t try to save a few bucks on a cheap splitter/combiner — the 99-cent specials from your local discount store are worth exactly what they cost (next to nothing). Spend $15 or $20 on a high-quality model from a manufacturer such as ChannelPlus (www.channelplus.com) or Channel Vision (www.channelvision.com). 3. Connect the RG6 cable from your antenna or cable TV feed to the Antenna/CATV input on the distribution panel. If you’re using modulators and an antenna to pull in local broadcast stations, you need to install an amplifier between the antenna and the distribution panel — otherwise you can actually start broadcasting your internal video over your antenna and out to the world. You probably don’t want to be doing this (for many reasons), and the FCC wants you doing this even less. Most manufacturers of distribution panels have such signal amplifiers for sale, as well — use the amplifier that they recommend for your specific distribution panel. You can’t simply plug the output of your DSS satellite system into your distribution panel’s Antenna/CATV input. Read the “Special Needs of Satellite Systems” section, later in this chapter, for information on this unfortunate phenomenon.
Slide 137: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network Most distribution panels (except those without built-in signal amplification) need electrical power to do their job. The majority use a small wall wart AC/DC power adapter like those used by cordless phones, modems, and tons of other small electrical appliances. Make sure you install a nice quad electrical outlet nearby — we always seem to be adding something in our wiring closets that needs power. As we mentioned, if all this two-way video sounds like something that you’ll never, ever want to get involved with, you can build a similar video-distribution network that forgoes the second RG6 cable to each outlet. Just follow the same basic architecture guidelines — all outlets individually wired with a length of RG6 cable running back to your central distribution node — and skip the second cable run. At the risk of being repetitive, we think this type of abbreviated network is a false economy, but it’s a perfectly valid way of constructing a home-video network. If you set up your network this way, we strongly recommend that you at least run a second cable to the room containing your home theater or media center. Chances are that’s where you have all the fun source devices, and a second cable there gives you the opportunity to share those sources throughout your home later. 115 Hooking up: Making connections in the TV rooms With the cables run, it’s time to connect the TVs and video source devices in each room to the network. Figure 7-2 shows typical in-room video connections. TV R L Video In CATV/ANT RG6 A/V interconnect RG6 Modulator 2-channel Audio In L R Video Out Video In RG6 Internal VCR Figure 7-2: Plugging video equipment together. L Audio Out CATV/ R Out to TV ANT IN External Video wall outlet RG6 DVD L Audio Out R Video Out A/V interconnect
Slide 138: 116 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Assuming that you’ve finished making your cable runs between the rooms and the distribution panel, just follow these steps: 1. Determine the video source devices (such as a VCR, DVD player, video-capable PC, or camcorder) that you want to distribute to other areas of the house, and connect them to a modulator, typically using an RCA or S-video cable. Modulators allow you to broadcast a device’s video signal around your house over an unused TV channel. We explain modulators as well as RCA and S-video cables in detail in Chapter 6. If you have several video source devices in the same room (such as your home-theater room with a PVR and a DVD player), you can use a multichannel modulator to broadcast multiple audio and video signals onto unused channels. 2. Run a length of RG6 coaxial cable with male connectors on both ends from the output jack of your modulator to the internal female coaxial connector jack in the wall. A coaxial wall jack is basically a faceplate with a female connector sticking out both sides. Remember that your point of reference for internal is inbound to the distribution panel. So when you’re standing in the room with the TV, the internal jack runs out of the room toward the distribution panel. If you think about it too long, you’ll get a headache. 3. Connect another length of RG6 cable with male connectors between your TV or cable set-top box and the external connector on your coaxial outlet. If you’re using a VCR or PVR, it should be connected in-line between the wall outlet and the television or set-top box with an RG6 coaxial cable. Use another RG6 coaxial cable to connect the output of the VCR or PVR to the TV. You can also use RCA or S-video cables from the Audio and Video Out jacks of the VCR or PVR to the Audio and Video In jacks on the TV. Figure 7-3 shows the signal path for watching a VCR in another room. If your VCR or PVR is connected to a modulator that has a loop-through connection (see Chapter 6), you can use these outlets and RCA cables to connect your VCR to your TV. 4. Perform Steps 1 through 3 for each room and pair of coaxial cables in your network. Lather, rinse, and repeat as desired. You now have a whole-home video network up and running! However, your work isn’t finished. You still need to program each modulator to an unused channel. We’re not going to give you step-by-step instructions on this task because each manufacturer’s model is different. For the most part, though, digital modulators are easy to tune in — it’s just a matter of pressing a program button a few times. Many models even have LCD or LED digital displays so that you can’t mess up.
Slide 139: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network Bedroom 117 TV In from CATV/Antenna RG6 coax Internal External Coax wall outlet VCR/PVR Video Out L Audio Out R RG6 coax A/V interconnect cable Out connections Figure 7-3: Watching a VCR or PVR in another room. Modulator Video In L Audio In R Internal RG6 RG6 coax External Coax wall outlet Coax distribution panel Media Room In from modulator Wiring Closet Summing Up The information in this chapter is a lot to grasp in one big gulp, so we thought we’d step back and give you a quick recap of what goes where in your wholehouse video network: In the wiring closet: • RG6 coaxial cable feeds from your antenna, or cable company, or both • A coaxial distribution panel to tie everything together (some vendors call these RF distribution panels) • An amplifier (may be built into the distribution panel) to boost antenna signals and to keep modulated signals from being broadcast over your antenna (optional for cable TV) In each room: • Two RG6 cables connected to the distribution panel (one to the in side of the panel, and one to the out side). Optionally, home offices and media rooms get four RG6 cables for extra flexibility. • An additional RG6 cable for the satellite receiver (optional).
Slide 140: 118 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center As long as you’ve installed a bidirectional distribution panel and an amplifier, you should be able to install a cable modem onto any of the external RG6 outlets in your house. An even better approach, however, is to get a distribution panel with a bypass for the cable modem (as we mention in Chapter 6). In this scenario, you just need to connect one of the RG6 cables running to your home office (or wherever the cable modem ends up in your house) to this bypass, instead of to one of the outputs of the distribution panel. Special Needs of Satellite Systems DSS (Digital Satellite System) small-dish satellite systems are a great way to receive TV programming, but they’re sort of a pain to integrate into your video network. The frequencies that satellite systems use and the way that coaxial cables carry the signal are different than those for standard TV signals. You can’t connect your satellite to your video distribution panel’s connector and distribute it through your house. To integrate a satellite into your network, you have to be a bit devious. In this section, we tell you how. We provide two methods of running your DSS satellite signal across your video network. The difference between these methods depends on whether or not you want a two-way network that can bring video back from various rooms. Running a one-way satellite network You may be thinking to yourself, “Heck, I’ve got this dish, so I don’t need cable.” And we have just the solution. You can build a video network for your DSS system that will carry the outputs from a DSS dish to multiple receivers throughout the home by using a multiswitch instead of a distribution panel. The downside to using a multiswitch is that the satellite network is one way. You still have to install a distribution panel if you want to share video sources across the network as we describe in the “Connecting Your Video Network” section, earlier in this chapter. If you want a two-way network with a satellite, check out the following section on a hybrid video network. To run your satellite picture to different receivers around your home, you need to replace the distribution panel with a special device known as a multiswitch, or voltage switch. The multiswitch connects to both outputs of a dual LNB (low noise block) dish and provides coaxial connections for up to four separate receivers. You simply use RG6 coaxial cable to connect each LNB output to your multiswitch and then run individual lengths of RG6 to each receiver location.
Slide 141: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network Some DSS dishes include integrated multiswitches, so you don’t need to buy anything extra. Just run RG6 cables from the back of the dish (where the multiswitch is located) down to the receiver locations. In some locations, you can’t get signals from the major broadcasts networks (such as Fox, NBC, CBS, or ABC) with a satellite. Nor can you get any local independent channels. You have to hook up an aerial antenna or get the basic package from your local cable company. If you’re interested in running an aerial TV antenna to pick up local stations, buy multiswitches that accept the output from a broadcast TV antenna and carry it over the same RG6 cables to your DSS receivers and televisions. These multiswitches include a device called a diplexer (check out the sidebar “What if I just want satellite and none of that fancy stuff?”), which lets you integrate both the satellite and local TV signals onto the same RG6 coaxial cable. 119 Creating a hybrid satellite/video network The drawback to using a multiswitch as the hub of your video network (as we describe in the preceding section) is that it creates a one-way network — from the satellite dish to the TV. If you want to be able to watch in one room video that’s sent from a device in another room (whether from a VCR, a DVD player, or a video camera in your baby’s room), you need to use a separate distribution panel for the return signal (or use alternate technologies such as CAT-5e, wireless, or phone line systems — which we describe later in the chapter). You have a couple of options if you want to get the best of both worlds in a hybrid two-way satellite/video network: Build a separate video network for your satellite. Build a videodistribution network for your DSS dish, with independent runs of coaxial RG6 cable from the dish, down through the attic (or from wherever the dish is mounted), and on to each location that will have a satellite receiver. With a multiswitch connected to the outputs of your satellite dish, you can connect up to four separate receivers to a dish. You can then build a video-distribution network using a distribution panel to handle the return signals and any signals you receive from cable or broadcast TV. The benefit of this system is that it gives you the ability to watch up to four DSS channels on four TVs simultaneously, while still allowing you to, say, watch in your bedroom a tape playing in a VCR in the hometheater room. The drawback of this system is the added expense and complexity of building a separate network — more cable to run and more equipment to buy.
Slide 142: 120 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Although most people mount the multiswitch right at the dish, you might also consider mounting the multiswitch in your wiring closet (vendors such as Leviton and Siemon make rack-mounted versions you can install right next to your video-distribution panel). In this scenario, you’d just run two RG6 cables from the dish to the wiring closet (to connect the two satellite LNBs to the inputs of the multiswitch), and then add another RG6 out to each room that will have a satellite receiver. In fact, if you’re not using a modulator in these rooms, you can take the second RG6 from that room (the internal one) and connect it to the multiswitch instead of the distribution panel — so you don’t need a third RG6 for satellite in that room. Treat your DSS receivers as source devices — just like VCRs or DVD players. You still need separate RG6 cabling runs from the dish to the receivers, but you can then use modulators to send the output of these receivers to every television in the house. Just install receivers in your two favorite watching areas and modulate them onto different channels for viewing from other TVs in the house. This solution has the benefit of adding only moderate cost (you have extra runs only to the receivers) and limited complexity. The drawback is that without using a multiswitch or voltage switch, you can watch only two DSS stations simultaneously (assuming you have a dual-LNB satellite that allows you to run two coaxial lines from your receiver. With a single-LNB receiver, you can watch only one station). As we mention in Chapter 6, DSS systems can carry high-definition TV signals to your home. To view these signals (assuming you’ve subscribed to them), you have to jump through a few extra hoops. First, you need to have an HDTV-ready TV and an HDTV satellite receiver (or an HDTV with a built-in HDTV receiver). Second, in most cases you need an antenna with a third LNB (because the HDTV signals come in on a different satellite than normal programming). You might not need to run extra cables from the dish to your receivers, however, because some of these triple LNB dishes include a built-in multiswitch that combines all three LNB outlets onto single runs of coax. If the dish isn’t so equipped, you may need to run an extra RG6 cable to the locations that have the HDTV receivers. Making satellite connections After running a satellite network, you should have a satellite input coaxial connector in each room. Depending on whether you opted for a hybrid system, you may or may not also have internal and external video jacks for sharing modulated source video devices. To complete the installation, use a short RG6 patch cable to connect the satellite receiver to the jack on the wall. Doing so brings the satellite signal from the wall to the satellite receiver. After connecting the receiver to your television, you should see crystal-clear satellite television.
Slide 143: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network 121 What if I just want satellite and none of that fancy stuff? If you decide that you don’t need or want a fullfledged, two-way video network and you’re going to use only DSS and local channels in your video network, you need to become familiar with the diplexer. The diplexer looks just like the splitter/combiner but combines broadcast or analog cable TV signals with the output of a DSS dish on a single length of RG6 cabling. You must use diplexers in pairs — one near your DSS dish where the antenna/cable feed is combined with the output of your LNB and another at the far end of your RG6 cabling, immediately before the cable plugs into your DSS receiver. The first diplexer combines the two cable feeds onto a single RG6 cable. The second splits this signal back into two separate signals — one connects to your receiver’s LNB input, and the other connects to the Antenna/CATV input on the back of the receiver. If you feed two DSS receivers directly from a dual LNB dish (without using a multiswitch) and you want to add your local channels from cable or antenna, you need four diplexers. If you use a multiswitch to send the output of your dish to more than two receivers, you need to buy a multiswitch with a built-in diplexer and then use an additional diplexer at each receiver. Even though diplexers and regular splitter/combiners look pretty much the same, they’re two different devices. Don’t try to save $20 by using any old splitter in your system: It won’t work. Here are a few more tips on DSS systems that are important to remember: You need a phone line in every room that has a DSS receiver. The DSS service provider uses this phone line to authenticate your box and provide pay-per-view movies, ACC basketball games, and the like. If your receivers aren’t connected to phone lines, you won’t be able to get payper-view or certain sports programming, and you’ll have to pay a full subscription fee for each additional receiver in the house — instead of an extra $5 per receiver. You can use a so-called wireless phone jack to run the phone line across your electrical cables. They’re not really wireless, because they use electrical cabling, but they save you from stringing a phone line across the room like a trip wire. (See Chapter 11 for more on these devices.) You should install special inline amplifiers if the distance between the dish and a receiver is longer than 100 feet. These amplifiers boost signal strength for long cable runs and are pretty cheap (between $25 and $100, depending on the level of amplification). They draw their power over the coaxial cable from the receiver, so they’re easy to install — just cut the cable and connect the amplifier between the two cut ends of the cable.
Slide 144: 122 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center You may want to install coaxial surge protectors on the RG6 runs from your dish. Doing so prevents lightning strikes on your roof from destroying your DSS receivers. Be careful when you choose a surge protector, though, because the standard cable TV models available in most electronics stores don’t pass the entire DSS signal. You need to buy specialpurpose surge protectors that specifically support DSS. Some surge protector manufacturers (such as Panamax — www.panamax.com) sell surge protectors that do triple duty — protecting the RG6, the phone line, and the power cord connected to your receiver. We don’t tell you in this chapter how to remotely control all this video equipment from other rooms. We haven’t forgotten; we have a long description of how to remotely control video (and audio) network components in Chapters 19 and 20. And in This Corner, CAT-5e/6 The backbone of your video network — the primary electrical highway that carries TV and other video programming around your house — should be constructed using RG6 coaxial cable. Bottom line: It’s just the best (and easiest, and most compatible) way of doing things. But sometimes you need to get video to and from places where RG6 doesn’t go. And sometimes you just can’t put any more video on the RG6 cable — for example, if you have a digital cable service that simply has no “room” for your in-home sources. A smart home has a great alternative already in the walls — the CAT-5e/6 cabling that’s also used for phone networks, data networks, and more. (You could use either type — CAT-5e or CAT-6 — for the applications we discuss in this section.) CAT-5e/6 is great for distributing locally sourced video (from DVD players, PVRs, and the like) around the house, but it’s not suited for carrying multichannel incoming video from broadcast antennas, cable TV feeds, or satellite dishes. So don’t mistake what we’re about to discuss as an alternative to an RG6 network. Instead, it’s a complementary network. The key to using CAT-5e/6 to carry video lies in the electronic devices attached to the ends of the CAT-5e/6 network. These electronics make the CAT-5e/6 unusable for other services, such as telephones or data LANs. You can’t just plug a video device into one of your phone jacks and expect it to work. It won’t, and neither will the phones until you unplug the video electronics. But if you read our discussion of a flexible CAT-5e/6 network in Chapter 2, you might have an inkling of what we’re getting at. (If you don’t, take a break from this discussion and take a quick peek.) To use CAT-5e/6 for video, you
Slide 145: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network need to go into your wiring closet and separate (physically and electrically) the cable runs you want to use for video from your other networks. These cable runs then need to be cross-connected together on your main distribution panel (or on a separate panel set up for your video over CAT-5e/6 network) so that all locations on your CAT-5e/6 video network are wired together. Some manufacturers, such as Leviton, make a special hub for your wiring closet to connect together video over CAT-5e/6 systems. After your CAT-5e/6 cables are connected together in your wiring panel, all you need to do to enable video over your CAT-5e/6 cables is to install some endpoint devices designed for the task. These devices can take a few forms: Stand-alone sender and receiver units: These are small boxes (smaller than many video components) that can sit on the rack next to the TV. The sender device sits in your media room (or wherever you want to share the video component) and connects to it like a modulator does — using the RCA composite or S-video connections on the back of the shared component. The sender is also connected by a CAT-5e/6 patch cable to the RJ-45 wall jack that you’ve dedicated to video. On the far end, you do the reverse — plug the receiver into the video-dedicated RJ-45 jack, and plug the composite or S-video outputs into your TV or home-theater receiver. The majority of these CAT-5e/6 video-distribution systems also carry stereo audio signals coming from your source device, so they can do double duty as a music distribution source. Senders and receivers integrated into wall outlets: These devices are functionally the same as the stand-alone units but are shrunk to wall outlets. The connection between the source components and the remote TVs stays the same, but instead of connecting an external box to an RJ-45 outlet, you replace your RJ-45 outlet with this device. Note: In some systems, you’ll see a bit of a mix-and-match approach, with a stand-alone sender and remote wall outlet receivers. The stand-alone units are the most common and typically have better picture quality. Eventually, the outlet-sized units will catch up, but right now they’re better for low-fidelity applications such as babycams. The majority of the video-over-CAT-5e/6 systems we’re discussing can carry only one video program at a time — they’re basically like extensions of composite or S-video. You can’t plug a DVD and a PVR, for example, into one of these devices and carry the signals to different TVs in the house simultaneously. Every TV receives the same signal with these systems, and you can’t put two senders on a single CAT-5e/6. A few high-end, expensive systems, such as those made by Crestron (see Chapter 20), can be used as a multisource video-transmission system. 123
Slide 146: 124 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Ack! Two warnings in a row — you must think that video-over-CAT-5e/6 is bad news. It’s not, but we need to tell you one more thing. Some video-overCAT-5e/6 solutions on the market are point-to-point solutions, meaning only one receiver can go along with the sender — you can send video from one spot to another but not to several others. If you want multiple receivers, make sure you buy a system that can handle that demand. As we write this, video-over-CAT-5e/6 systems are still new and relatively expensive. We think that they’ll become a better alternative to the distribution of in-home video sources than the more traditional modulator and RG6 approach — mainly because they’ll be able to carry higher-quality video signals (such as component video or even HDMI) and fully digital audio signals. For example, ChannelPlus’s SVC-10 system can carry S-video and Dolby Digital surround sound to a remote location over CAT-5e/6 (try that with a modulator!). And Gefen (www.gefen.com) has systems such as the HDMI•1000HDS, which can send HDMI high-definition video over CAT-5e/6 as far as 333 feet. As these systems mature and become capable of supporting higher-quality video and audio signals in a truly multipoint way (from one location to several others), they may make modulators obsolete. Cut the Cord: Wireless Alternatives for Video Distribution Phones and data networks aren’t the only things in your home that can benefit from advances in wireless networking. A few products that use wireless technologies work well for your home-entertainment network if all you need to do is add a device (for example, one TV or one set of speakers) rather than take care of your entire whole-home-networking needs. Wireless video-distribution systems accept the video and audio outputs of a video source — such as a VCR, DSS satellite receiver, or DVD player — and send them somewhere else in the home using an RF wireless link. These systems basically consist of two small units, each containing an antenna. The transmitter unit attaches to your video source through standard RCA-type audio and video connectors. The receiver unit usually offers both an RCA and an RF output to connect to the television on the far end. Figure 7-4 shows a wireless video-distribution network. If you’re looking into a wireless video system, here’s what you should keep in mind:
Slide 147: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network What frequency spectrum does it use? Some of these systems use the 900-MHz frequency band; others use the higher 2.4-GHz band. In general, 2.4-GHz systems perform better because higher-frequency RF signals run cleaner with less interference from other systems and pass through walls and ceilings better. Additionally, 2.4-GHz systems provide more available bandwidth to carry the video signals. Does the system transmit audio in mono or stereo? If your video source includes high-quality sound, you probably want to spend a bit more to get stereo audio. Does the system carry IR (infrared) control signals? Some do, and it sure is handy to be able to do things such as pause, rewind, or change channels while watching a program in the bedroom without having to walk to the living room. This feature is a must-have to us, unless you already have an IR control network built into your home — but if you have an IR network installed, we’re pretty sure that you want to have a coaxial video-distribution network as well, so you won’t be needing the wireless system. 125 Bedroom TV Video In L Audio In R Wireless video receiver Video Out L Audio Out R A/V interconnect Wireless 900-MHz or 2.4-GHz signal Wireless video transmitter Media Room Figure 7-4: Using wireless systems in a video network. Video In L Audio In R VCR/PVR/DVD Video Out L Audio Out R A/V interconnect If you live in an older historic home, the type with tin ceilings, know that these reflect and block signals. Therefore, RF video transmitters may not give you the quality you’d like.
Slide 148: 126 Part II: Making Your Home an Entertainment Center Coming soon: HDMI over the air An alternative to CAT-5e systems for distributing high-definition video is on its way. Although no systems are commercially available as we write in early 2007, several vendors have announced wireless HDMI systems, which can take the HDMI output of a source device — a digital settop box, an HDTV satellite receiver, a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player, and so on — and transmit it wirelessly across the room or across the house. These systems, at least the early ones that will be on the market in 2007, are point-to-point, so they’re not designed to send a signal to every room in the house. Their primary application will be within a home theater or media room, getting HDTV signals to a flat-panel TV mounted on a wall somewhere in the room without requiring any wires to be installed in the walls. In the longer term, however, we expect more of a whole-home angle to these systems, with multipoint distribution (one source, multiple TVs) as a part of follow-on products. An example of one of these systems is the WHDI (Wireless High-Definition Interface) system from Amimom (www.amimon.com). This system carries a single channel of HDMI (including its audio) up to 100 feet (or more), at resolutions of up to 1080i. Amimom and several other companies are working to build their receivers right into HDTVs, so all you would need to “cut the cord” would be a transmitter that connects to the HDMI output of your source devices. Pretty cool stuff; we can’t wait to get our hands on it. The folks at Ruckus Wireless (www.ruckuswireless.com) have a successful wireless distribution system that uses Wi-Fi wireless networking combined with some neat antenna tricks that “beam form” your wireless signal to maximize reach and speed to distribute HDTV over a wireless link. Their system is primarily available through TV service providers as part of a complete TV network of set-top boxes and wireless extenders. But consumers can buy a MediaFlex system for their own in-home video distribution for IP video sources (such as gaming systems and IP set-top boxes for Internet TV services and computers). The MediaFlex system isn’t designed to work with traditional video sources (such as cable set-top boxes or DVD players), so it’s really a solution for video sources coming from the Internet and your broadband connection. But it works well for those IP sources and can also be used as your home’s primary Wi-Fi wireless computer network. Use What You Already Have: Phone Line Alternatives for Video Distribution Most of the action in developing home-networking systems that run on existing phone wires is in the data-networking field, but some companies are looking into ways to use phone lines for home-entertainment systems. Like the
Slide 149: Chapter 7: Wiring a Video Network phone line data-networking systems we discuss in Chapter 16, these products utilize digital signal processing to carry entertainment signals on different frequencies than those used by the telephone service. This means they can be used simultaneously with telephone equipment connected to the network. These systems use different frequencies than analog telephone systems use, but there’s no guarantee that they use different frequencies than the phone line data-networking systems use. That means interference could be a major problem if you try to use both systems in your home, so we strongly recommend against it. Single-purpose wiring eliminates this kind of conflict, which is why we think it’s the best way to go. You won’t find any phone line video-distribution systems available directly to you as a consumer. Like the Ruckus wireless system we describe in the section “Cut the Cord: Wireless Alternatives for Video Distribution,” phone line systems are sold as part of a complete package by a TV service provider. These systems use a technology called HPNA (Home Phoneline Networking Alliance) — specifically, the latest version of this technology called HPNA 3.0. HPNA 3.0 provides speeds up to 320 Mbps over regular phone wires, which is fast enough to carry several channels of HDTV at one time. You’ll find HPNA integrated into digital set-top boxes for IPTV services from phone companies and other service providers. For example, if AT&T is your local phone company, you may be able to get TV services from them (as a replacement for cable or satellite TV). AT&T’s set-top boxes use HPNA to send video signals from the main set-top box to satellite set-top boxes in other rooms — and even use this as part of a multiroom DVR service, which records programs on one set-top box but allows you to watch them on any other set-top box. 127
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