Feature: The five technologies that will transform homes of the future

You get home from work on a Tuesday evening. Sensing your arrival, your home turns on the lights in the living room and kitchen. You stop by the bathroom and step on your Internet-connected scaleit absorbs your day's activity levels from a clip-on fitness monitoring device, then logs them on a website along with your sleeping activity and health history.

After making dinner, you sit down in front of the TV and tell it you want to buy a series you heard about on the way home from work. It responds to your voice, and in a few seconds downloads the entire first season over a gigabit connection. The series automatically downloads to your tablet, too, so you'll have it available on the go tomorrow.

We've been sold on such technological visions for years, but they always seem to be "three to five years" out. The tech we do get never seems to work quite as seamlessly as the futurists suggest. And yet we're still making remarkable technical progress; networking in general, and the Internet in particular, have only begun to transform our homes. Here are five basic technologies that will soon prove crucial to our networked livesand none are mere fantasies. The core technologies exist; shipping products exist. They just need to make it into more homes before the effects are truly felt.

A lucky few communities have already managed to line up gigabit home Internet connections: Google's projects in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, EPB's network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Sonic.net's plans for San Francisco.

Gigabit fiber connections remain the technological equivalent of Evil Knievel stunt-jumping a row of buses. Such speeds are more entertaining than practical for most, but content on the Internet will only continue to grow in size and quality. The Internet connection provides the baseline bandwidth that makes all of home network uses possible.

But getting gigabit Internet into the house does little good if you can't share it. To that end, groups like the Wireless Gigabit Alliance are already at work transitioning gigabit connections to WiFi. By focusing a concentrated signal from router to connected device, or "beamforming," the IEEE 802.11ad WiGig specification will allow data transmission speeds of up to 7Gbps. Qualcomm plans to start making 802.11ac chips soon that will give mobile and desktop devices access to 1.3Gbps WiFi speeds.

Faster WiFi can't come soon enough: a lot of our personal Internet business is currently conducted through smartphones (thus 3G and 4G connections). Carriers are straining under the load, capping data and throttling "unlimited" connections. We can expect more carriers producing devices with technology that makes offloading to WiFi as seamless as possible.

Another new standard, 802.11u, streamlines the process of switching between 3G and WiFi. Instead of presenting users with a long list of inscrutable SSIDs, 802.11u lets devices see and automatically connect to active WiFi, thus offloading activity from the cellular data connection. Of course, this requires public, trustworthy WiFi, like the one managed by the city of Chattanooga. They're rare today, but will likely become a necessary supplement to the cellular networks struggling to keep up.

There's a lack of transparency in the power usage of most homes. Power comes in, it gets used, and you get a bill. The "how" and "how much" of what happens in between are difficult to determine. But a range of technologies and devices are setting themselves up to make the whole life-cycle of energy more visible and easier to control.

For example, the Nest Learning Thermostat received a lot of buzz last fall for its ability to adapt automatically to users' habits and temperature preferences. Leave the house at 8AM everyday? The Nest detects your routine and learns to stop heating or cooling the house unnecessarily. Come home for an impromptu lunch, nap, or Skyrim session? The Nest detects that too, and starts warming or cooling the house to your ideal temperature.

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Feature: The five technologies that will transform homes of the future