WIRED:Which gadget in your house is going to see the greatest innovation and explosion in use in the next few years and will end up turning out to be the centre of your media, your work life, and maybe even your social life? Will it be your XBox? Your home PC? Your work laptop? Your mobile phone? Your television, even?
All of these have a chance, but if I were a (hopelessly reckless) betting man, I'd put my money on a far smaller, far humbler piece of kit. Your modem.
Not that whistling box that plugs into your phone line. Hopefully, you've been able to move onto a broadband connection, and will have either a cable modem, or a small DSL box that came with your broadband connection. These boxes, either branded by your ISP, or under generic labels like "Linksys", generally plug into your one PC, and give you a connection to the internet.
In more sophisticated, two-PC households, you might have a box that lets you plug a host of computers, printers and other peripherals together. You may even have a box that broadcasts a Wi-Fi signal to which you can connect your computer without wires.For most computer users, that's pretty much all that box does, or is intended to do.
It's just an internet connectivity box. But for the "alpha geeks", the cutting-edge innovators who toy with the very new, these "modems" - or slightly more accurately, routers - have been commandeered for many new uses. And if the old rule holds true, where the ubergeeks go first, everyone else follows in a few years.
The reason for the repurposing of these routers is simple. Most of them are actually fully-fledged computers in their own right, often running the open source operating system, Linux. And if they're not running Linux, there's usually a crowd of eager hackers attempting to get them to run Linux.
In the interests of simplicity, the commercial version of these routers is set up to do only one or two things: get you your net connection, and perhaps manage your wireless WiFi network.
But as general purpose computers, reprogrammed, they can do a lot more. They can act as home web servers or file-servers, sharing and storing data for everyone in the house. They can act as MP3 jukeboxes. They can act as "WiFi hotspots", allowing you to eke out a portion of your net connection to neighbours (with tight controls over what they can and can't do). They can allow secure remote access to your home network, just as some businesses allow remote access to company networks.
Of course, that may not sound terribly fascinating to you or your loved ones right now. But consider: these mini-computers are dropping in price faster than any other piece of computing equipment. You can generally pick one up for under €50. And they're not getting any less powerful: just as other systems are getting faster and cheaper and more capable, so are these routers.
Because they run on largely open hardware, they can incorporate some of the other innovations in the open source world. Already one famous open source project, Asterisk, has been hacked to work on these routers. Asterisk is the complete code to run an entire phone exchange: that is, run free phone calls and a free phone answering system from your home.
MP3 jukeboxes will be replaced by TV-quality video downloading and storage.
Home servers will turn into services that will synchronise and back up your home computers, and talk to your work systems. These home routers will help in the fight against spam and viruses, soaking up the donkey work while freeing up your home PC or laptop to do the fun stuff.
And that's the catch with my prophecy. I don't expect routers ever to play a starring role in your domestic life. In fact, where they will shine is silently taking on many of the roles and frustrations that we currently have to outsource to commercial concerns like Microsoft, Symantec and even our ISP. Many of these functions are better handled closer to home, in a system that doesn't need constant maintenance or pricey upgrades, but can sit in the background and silently stitch your digital life together.
In order to do that, it has to be low price (which rules out both Microsoft and Apple, which make their money on mark-ups far too big for a sub-€50 machine), and be manufactured and distributed by a group that doesn't see these future home media centres as competition. That might rule out ISPs - and even PC manufacturers.
It could even rule out the current makers of these boxes. The name behind Linksys, one of the biggest sellers in this sector, is Cisco, who would rather you didn't know that features they sell on their $1,000 routers can be implemented on their €50 home versions with just a tweak to the basic software.
No, what these boxes need is a disruptive and innovative new entrant who sees them for what they are: an easy lead into controlling the home market. But who will step up to the challenge?
