The network is the house

Nobody has ever rung us to say their network is down.

They ring to say the television will not turn on. That the shades in the primary bedroom have gone slow. That the cameras stutter, or the music drops out in the kitchen but nowhere else, or that the whole thing worked perfectly until Thursday and now it does not.

These are all the same call. We could put most of them on one line: something that used to talk to something else has stopped being able to.

Why this happened

Twenty years ago a home cinema was a stack of boxes joined by cables you could point at. If the picture went, the fault was somewhere along a wire you could physically follow.

That is no longer the shape of anything. The lighting processor is on the network. The shades are on the network. The control system, the streamers, the amplifiers, the cameras, the doorbell, the thermostats, the pool controller, the irrigation, the garage door, and the television that will not turn on — all of it is talking IP. In a large house that is frequently a hundred and fifty addressed devices, most of which the owner has never thought of as computers.

Every one of them is a computer. The house is a small business that nobody hired an IT department for.

The five we see most

The ISP box is the whole network

A single unit from the internet provider, doing routing, switching, wireless and firewall for eight thousand square feet. It is a fine piece of equipment for a flat. Asked to carry a house, it runs out of session table, runs hot, and reboots itself at three in the morning. The owner experiences this as "sometimes things just go funny overnight."

Wireless placed by hope

Access points positioned where there happened to be a convenient spot, rather than from a plan. Modern construction is hostile to radio in ways that surprise people — spray foam insulation, foil-backed board, metal studs, stone, tile, plaster over lath in the older houses. Mesh kits marketed on square footage assume open plan and drywall. A great many Dallas-Fort Worth homes are neither.

One flat network

The guest phone, the child's console, the robot vacuum, the lighting processor and the camera recorder all sharing one broadcast domain. Everything can see everything. When a device starts misbehaving — and consumer devices do — it degrades things that have nothing to do with it. Control traffic is small and impatient; it does not compete well against a games console downloading eighty gigabytes.

The address pool quietly running out

A default network hands out a limited range. Every phone, watch, guest and delivery of new devices takes one. Some hold on far longer than they need to. Eventually a device asks for an address and does not get one, and the symptom is that a keypad stops working while the television is fine.

Nothing on a UPS

A brownout, or one of the flickers this part of the country gets in summer, and the whole rack comes back up in an order nobody chose. Some things tolerate that. Controllers and switches often do not, and now a system that was working is not, for reasons nobody in the house can see.

How it ought to be built

None of the fixes are exotic. They are just decisions someone has to make deliberately.

• Wire what can be wired. Wireless is for things that move. A television, a controller, a camera and an amplifier do not move. Every device on a cable is a device that cannot have a wireless problem.
• Place access points from a plan. Ceilings, not shelves. Enough of them. Positioned against the actual construction of the actual house, not a coverage figure off a box.
• Separate the traffic. Control on its own segment. Cameras on their own. Guests firmly somewhere else. A misbehaving device should be able to ruin its own day and nothing else's.
• Power over Ethernet, and one thing to reboot. Fewer plugs, fewer adapters behind fewer sofas, and a switch that can restart a stuck device without anyone climbing a ladder.
• Protect the rack. A UPS, correct ventilation, and a controlled start-up order after an outage.
• Watch it. Remote monitoring means we frequently know a device has dropped before the client has noticed, and a decent proportion of what would have been a service call becomes something we quietly fix from here.

The unglamorous truth

Nobody has ever walked into a room and admired the network. It has no finish, it wins no compliments, and the better it is the less anyone thinks about it.

But it is the one system in the house every other system is standing on. Speakers can be upgraded. Displays get replaced every seven or eight years. The infrastructure that carries all of it gets built once, usually inside walls, and either holds the house up for two decades or generates a service call every few months for the same two decades.

It is the least exciting line on any proposal we write, and it is the one we argue hardest about.