Integrating the Digital Home

The new problem area is more likely to be does my broadband line have enough capacity to take the streamed IPTV, VoIP calls to international relatives and teenagers downloading music and playing massively multiplayer online games on three continents.

Not so much quad play as a triple whammy needing as much bandwidth as the connection can possibly deliver-and with the requisite priorities and qualities of service to worry about.

Copper may be the commodity de jour, but the derivative market is in connectivity-wire, fibre or wireless.

Inside the house it's no better, as consumer electronics buying turns into a significantly strategic ICT purchasing decision.

When I upgrade the TV do I choose HD ready and what impact does that have on my cabling? The builder put category 5 into the house, but like the power sockets they aren't where I really need them, so can I move to Wi-Fi and which generation of 802.11 alphabet soup standards will I need?

The good news is convergence - everything is IP. The bad news is that's only an internetworking standard, and as soon as you head up the integration stack and want it all to work together, protocols and, worse still, data formats diverge.