Creating the Perfect Connected Home This year, Connected Home Magazine's Virtual Tour will focus on different aspects of creating a perfect connected home. For summer, our focus is on networking your home. Impress visitors to your connected home with your ability to stay in touch no matter where you are or what you’re doing. A solid network infrastructure is a must-have feature for any modern home, and the cost of installation is small compared to the benefits you’ll get over the life of the home. Today you’ll use the network mostly for Internet access, but in the future you may use it for voice communication, home automation, and security monitoring. Sharing an Internet connection for browsing is the primary justification for today’s home networks, but it may not stay that way for long. ReplayTV is one example of why the future home needs a solid networking infrastructure. When manufacturers see a growing market of connected homes, they will begin to create products that take advantage of built-in networking. Imagine, for example, a box that retrieves the current local weather forecast from the National Weather Service over the Internet and speaks it over a speaker using text-to-speech conversion. Push one button in the morning and you’d always know whether to bring the umbrella. To learn more about what you should consider when networking your home, read "Networking: The Heart of a Connected Home."