Going smart was all supposed to have happened a decade ago, but the dotcom meltdown slowed down the triumph of the machines. Now the pace is picking up again — but not

in Britain, of course. While Orange — which has employed techno-literate families to live in a £2m test home in Hertfordshire — and a dozen other UK innovators plead with a leading housebuilder to come into partnership here, the Americans are steaming ahead.

Which means that, in a few years’ time, when we have watched enough wired homes in Hollywood movies to envy and demand one, we shall have to turn to the land of George W Bush for the expertise.

While British boffins tried to sell the wired home as an advanced Teasmaid, the Americans went straight for the soft underbelly of their consumer — creating an insatiable “need” for more home entertainment, whether blockbuster or pornography. This same desire fuelled the personal-computer boom of the 1990s.

Powered by the growth of high-speed internet, the number of wired homes in America will increase from the current 700,000 to 1.7m by 2005, by which time more than half of all new homes will have the root cables known as Smurfs (they are blue) built into the foundations, without adding more than £2,000 to the selling price. Builders there say it costs less than £1,000 to Smurf a house under construction, and £5,000 to retrofit a typical American suburban home, which has drywall nailed on to wooden frames rather than plaster.

Entire new suburbs, mostly in the south, from Miami to Atlanta, are springing up as wired as a student cramming for finals. Of course, the drive has come from techies such as Motorola and Cisco seeing new markets rather than homeowners desperate to turn on their coffee-makers while stuck in a traffic jam, and the recession is still dampening demand, but the hook is in. A recent survey indicated that nearly half of America would pay for a “digital jukebox” to downloads films and music on demand from the internet.

Last month, Home Director, an IBM spin-off that has already sold 50,000 “wiring packages” to American builders, signed up with Ecclestone Signature Homes, a builder in Florida, to offer a service called AudioPoint. This is a £200 black box that can play pop tunes downloaded from the internet in any room in the house, with every member of the family having their own musical “stream”.

“There are running costs, obviously, and systems will have to be upgraded on a regular basis, but initial evidence suggests that advanced wiring adds significantly to the resale value of the houses,” says a Home Director executive. “There is no doubt that this home revolution will spread to Europe over the next few years.”

Instead of imagining scary robots, voice-activated computers and the like, the smart home reality is down-to-earth, not overly costly, and downright useful. So far, however, the uptake of smart technology in Britain has been pretty tiny. According to Rupert Wood of Analysys, a global telecoms consultancy and research house, only a few thousand people have set up smart home offices, and broadband (essential for smart living) still hasn’t reached 10% of homes. But the revolution is just around the corner — a recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggested that 4 out of 10 households will be smart within 10 years.

The initial outlay may be much lower than you’d expect. Tim Garman, development director of LiveSmarter, a specialist in technology-enabled living, reckons that to cable a three-bedroom house would start at about £1,500. In the long run, you may even save money, on heating and lighting bills, internet connection costs and on upgrading your electronics (with everything centralised).

Techaus, an Oxford-based firm, is already helping owners of second homes in Italy, Spain, and even Cornwall, protect their properties by remote security. It is working with a developer in Marbella to fit intruder alarms that will report directly to telephones in Britain, or send CCTV pictures to home computers, while the technology can prepare for your arrival abroad by switching on lights, heating and ventilation, all from your mobile phone, with prices starting from £1,600.

Of course, the company also installs custom-designed and commissioned systems in Britain.

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