Category Archives: digital home

My love affair with the phone central office

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I have a thing about the telephone central office (CO). I love spotting them in the wild, giving me some sense of the vast connectedness that they represent, the legal wrangling that took place over their real estate, and their history in our telecommunications connectedness. That is a lot to pack into a series of structures, which is why I am attracted to them.

Many of you may not be familiar with the lowly CO, so I should probably back up and set the scene. Back in the day when all of us had landline phones, indeed, before we even called them such things, the phone company had to wire these phone lines to one central place in each community. A pair of low-voltage wires ran from your home to this central office, and were connected to a vast wire switching center called the main distribution frame. The central office actually supplied the dial tone that you heard when you picked up your phone, which assured you that your phone line was operating properly.

Interestingly, one of the inventors of the central office was a Hungarian named Tivadar Puskas, and I actually got to visit the fruits of his labors when I was in Budapest several years ago. The building that housed his switchboard is now offices occupied by the firm Prezi. Notice it still is quite a beautiful structure, with gothic touches and high ceilings.

I was reminded of visiting the Prezi offices when I was on a trip last week to Columbus Indiana. I have been wanting to go there for several years since first learning that the small city contains some of the best examples of modern architecture in one place. What does this have to do with phone COs? Well, they have a beautiful CO building that was designed in 1978 and it once looked like this.

Columbus’ CO was actually an expansion of an earlier and more modest building that was built in the 1930s. The phone company needed more room as the town grew and they were adding services, and so we have this space-frame curtain-glass wall structure that was built around the original building. I would urge those of you interested in seeing other great modern structures to schedule your own trip to the town and see what they have done because there is a lot to see.

But let’s get back to the phone CO. These buildings were at the center of activity back in the 1990s when DSL technology (which is the broadband technology that the phone companies still use to deliver Internet services) was first coming into popularity. At the time there were a number of independent startups such as Covad and Rhythms that wanted to provide DSL to private customers. The phone companies tried to block them, claiming that there wasn’t enough room in the COs to add their equipment. Back in the day, there weren’t many higher-speed data service offerings, so DSL was a very big improvement. This battle eventually was won and while these startups have come and gone, we have Uverse service offered by AT&T as a result. (I wrote about these DSL issues in an interesting historical document from that era.)

In 2001, I was teaching TCP/IP networking to a class of high school boys and wanted to take them on a series of field trips to noteworthy places and businesses near the school. Now, field trips are normal for younger kids, but when you get to high school, that means taking your kids out of other regularly scheduled classes. I thought this would be interesting to my students and so one of the first trips we took was a short one, down the street to the local CO. This was in a very non-descript structure that many of us passed by frequently and didn’t give it any thought (see the photo here).

To give you additional context, this was about two months after the 9/11 attacks. Somehow I was able to convince the Verizon folks (what the local phone company was called at the time) to allow me to bring a bunch of high school kids into their CO. I recall we had old Bell veterans who gave us a tour, and when the time came to show the kids where their home phone lines were located, I volunteered to have them find my own wire pair. I remember the employee pulled the location of my phone wires and told the class that I had something very unusual: back then I had an office phone that also was wired to my home, and he could show the students how this worked so the phones rang in both locations.

I realize that nowadays the landline is a historical communications curiosity more than anything, and you have to look long and hard to even find someone who uses one anymore. So it is great that there are few phone COs that are grandly designed and stand out as great examples of architecture and design, such as the ones I have seen in Budapest and Columbus. Do send me your own favorites too, and best wishes for a great 2018.

Lessons learned from the Minitel era

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Technologists tend to forget the lessons learned from the immediate past, thinking that new tech is always better and more advanced than those dusty modems of yesteryear. That is why a new book from MIT Press on Minitel is so instructive and so current, especially as we devolve from a net-neutral world in the weeks and years to come. Much as I want to be tempted to discuss net neutrality, let’s just leave those issues aside and look at the history of Minitel and what we can learn from its era.

Minitel? That French videotext terminal thing from the 1980s and 1990s? Didn’t that die an ignominious death from the Internet? Yes, that is all true. But for its day, it was ahead of its time and ahead of today’s Internet in some aspects too. You’ll see what I mean when you consider its content and micropayments, network infrastructure, and its hybrid public/private ownership model. Let’s dive in.

Minitel was the first time anyone figured out how to develop a third-party payments system called Kiosk that made it easier for content providers to get paid for their work, and laid the foundation for the Apple App Store and others of its ilk. It presaged the rise of net porn well before various Internet newsgroups and websites gained popularity, and what was remarkable was that people paid money for this content too.  It was the first time a decentralized network could hook up a variety of public clients and servers of different types. Granted the clients were 1200 bps terminals and the network was X.25, but still this was being done before anyone had even thought of the Web. It was the first public/private tech partnership of any great size: millions of ordinary citizens had terminals (granted they got them free of charge) well before AOL sent out its first CD and before the first private dot coms were registered. The authors call this “private innovation decentralized to the edges of the network.” This is different from what the Internet basically did beginning in the middle 1990s, which was to privatize the network core. Before then, the Internet was still the province of the US government and had limited private access.

Minitel made possible a whole series of innovations well before their Internet-equivalents caught on, sometimes decades earlier. The book describes a whole series of them, including e-government access, ecommerce, online dating, online grocery ordering, emjois and online slang, electronic event ticketing and electronic banking. When you realize that at its peak Minitel had 25,000 services running, something that the Web wouldn’t reach until 1995, it is a significant accomplishment.

Minitel wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. Like AOL, it was a “walled garden” approach, but in some aspects it was more open than today’s Internet in ways that I will get to in a moment. It had issues being controlled by a nationalized phone company.

Certainly, the all-IP Internet was a big improvement over Minitel. You didn’t have to provision those screwy and expensive X.25 circuits. You could send real graphics, not those cartoon ones that videotext terminals used that were more like ASCII art. Minitel was priced by the minute, because that is what the phone company knew how to do things. Certainly, the early days of the Internet had plenty of 1200 bps modem users who had to pay per call, or set up a separate phone line for their modems. Now we at least don’t have to deal with that with broadband networks that are thousands of times faster.

One side note on network speeds: Minitel actually had two speeds: 1200 and 75 bps. Most of the time, the circuits were set up 1200/75 down/up. You could send a signal to switch the speeds if you were sending more than you were receiving, but that had to happen under app control.

So what can we learn from Minitel going into the future? While most of us think of Minitel as a quaint historical curio that belongs next to the Instamatic camera and the Watt steam engine, it was far ahead of its time. Minitel was also a cash infusion that enabled France to modernize and digitize its aging phone infrastructure. It was the first nationalized online environment, available to everyone in France. It proved that a state subsidy could foster innovation, as long as that subsidy was applied surgically and with care.  As the authors state, “sometimes complete control of network infrastructure by the private sector stifles rather than supports creativity and innovation.”

When we compare Minitel to today’s online world, we can see that the concept of open systems is a multi-dimensional continuum, and that it is hard to judge whether Minitel and the Internet are more or less open.  As we begin the migration of a neutral Internet infrastructure to one that will be controlled by the content providers, we should keep that in mind. The companies that control the content have different motivations from the users who consume that content. I do think we will see a vastly different Internet in 30 years’ time, just as the Internet of 1987 is very different from the one we all use today.

Book review: Good Reception by Antero Garcia

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The use of technology in schools is analyzed from the actual front lines of a ninth grade classroom in South Central LA in this new book. The teacher, Antero Garcia, has learned some valuable lessons on his own about how technology can’t fix broken schools and how teachers use new media such as smartphones and tablets as an ancillary activity and not part of mainstream classroom methods. Garcia finds that the transformative moments for his students happened in spite of his pedagogical activities, and that the iPods he supplied as part of the research project described in this book often hindered rather than helped their learning. This book will be interesting to educators and parents who are trying to understand the appropriate role of technology with students and schools.

Book review: The Selfie Generation

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Alicia Eler once worked for me as a reporter, so count me as a big fan of her writing. Her first book, called The Selfie Generation, shows why she is great at defining the cultural phenomenon of the selfie. As someone who has taken thousands of selfies, she is an expert on the genre. Early on in the book she says that anyone can create their own brand just by posting selfies, and the selfie has brought together both the consumer and his or her social identity. The idea is that we can shape our own narratives based on how we want to be seen by others.

Do selfies encourage antisocial behavior? Perhaps, but the best photographers aren’t necessarily social beings. She captures the ethos from selfie photographers she has known around the world, such as @Wrongeye, Mark Tilsen and Desiree Salomone, who asks, “Is it an act of self-compassion to censor your expression in the present in favor of preserving your emotional stability in the future?”

Are teens taking selfies an example of the downfall of society? No, as Eler says, “teens were doing a lot of the same things back then, but without the help of social media to document it all.”

She contrasts selfies with the Facebook Memories feature, which automatically documents your past, whether you want to remember those moments or not. She recommends that Facebook include an option to enable this feature, for those memories that we would rather forget.

Eler says, “Nowadays, to not tell one’s own life story through pictures on social media seems not only old-fashioned, but almost questionable—as if to say ‘yes, I do have something to hide,’ or that one is paranoid about being seen or discoverable online.”

Eler mentions several forms of selfies-as-art. For example, there is the Yolocaust project, to shame those visitors to the various Holocaust memorials around the world who were taking selfies and make them understand the larger context. And the “killfie,” where someone taking a picture either inadvertently or otherwise dies.

This is an important book, and I am glad I had an opportunity to work with her early in her career.

Time to really go paperless when it comes to boarding passes

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I have been a big fan of paperless airline boarding passes almost since their introduction, and a recent post reminded me of yet another reason: they can become an easy way to compromise your identity. The reason is a combination of the low and high technology, all leveraging your smart phone’s camera.

The issue has to do with the way the airlines make it easy to use the printed bar code information to gain access to your flight details. Brian Krebs first wrote about this several years ago, and if you still use the printed boarding passes, the first thing you should know is that you shouldn’t post pictures of them on any of your social media outlets. Krebs found more than 90,000 such images exist when he did a quick search.

So here is what could happen. Criminals look for these photos, and could then use the QR code or the booking reference number to gain access to your flight details. Think about this for a moment. Let’s say you are on vacation, and you post your “here I am at the airport about to take off for a long trip on the other side of the planet” obligatory photo. Now someone comes along, and can change your return flight, or use this information to leverage more identity theft since the booking contains information such as your passport number and birthdate.

And of course, posting flight details is another way that criminals could decide to pay your unoccupied home a visit while you are away too.

Some folks purposely blur out the details about their name, but leave the barcode visible, such as this photo above, where we can find out her full name by scanning the barcode. Oops.

This method works for dumpster diving too. How many of us leave our used boarding papers on board the aircraft that we are leaving, thinking no use to me? I have done that several times. Again, someone could use that information to hijack my account. So avoid leaving your boarding pass in the trash at the airport or tucked into that seat-back pocket in front of you before deplaning. Instead, bring it home and shred it. And don’t take pictures of your boarding pass. Finally, be careful of spreading your “real” birthday around on social media. My “birthday” has been January 1 for several years: my real friends know when it actually is.

So go paperless when you can. And be careful what you post online.

Netgear’s Arlo Pro security cameras: Better than before but pricey

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This article is the latest installment in my smart home series. A natural addition to any smart home would be to use security cameras to monitor your entry points. I tested the latest Netgear Arlo cameras, including the Arlo Pro and the Arlo Go. Overall, my review is mixed.   

Netgear has had its Arlo line for several years. What is new with these two units is the rechargeable batteries, so you don’t spend a small fortune on replacing the ones in the cameras. The design goal with Arlo is that you can run them completely cable-free, so you can place them optimally without regard to wiring. By that they mean that you don’t have to run any wires to them, either for power or network connectivity.

But there are two different battery sizes for the Pro and the Go models. Go includes a slightly larger unit that comes with its own stand. Pro has a smaller magnetic attachment device to be mounted on the wall.Either Pro or Go batteries can be recharged outside the camera with an optional $60 charging dock, which is included in some of the multiple-camera kits.  

The older Arlo models used ordinary batteries that drained quickly. These newer models use rechargeable ones that last a couple of weeks, depending on usage, and connect via Wi-Fi networks (in the case of the Pro) or Go has its own AT&T SIM card. That means the Go can be placed anywhere that has a cell signal, and if you don’t have any indoor Wifi. You can see the signal strength on its web portal page. This is great for a remote cabin the woods, as long as it isn’t too far afield from a cell tower.

Both of the newer cameras can record ambient audio and can see a 130 degree video view in HD quality, along with night vision rather at 850 nm that can see things up to 25 feet away. You can also control a 8x zoom lens in real time. The original Arlo cameras has a 110 degree view and no audio capabilities.  

Camera setup is very simple. You connect the controller to your wired network, download the smartphone app, and press the button on the controller and then on each camera for it to be recognized by the system. You need to create a login ID with the web service. One ID per system only. Once you have setup the cameras with this login, you can use the smartphone app outside of your home network.

You can only be logged in at one location: either via the smartphone app or the web portal. This is a security feature. The web and smartphone app controls are almost the same, with the exception of geo-fencing mode that is available on the phone app only.

The cameras have four different detection modes: armed, schedule, geo, and disarmed. The schedule mode allows you to turn off the detection during the weekend or when motion sensing would kick off too many alerts. You can also set up your own custom rules for all the cameras connected to your hub or for particular Go cameras.

You can set various thresholds — for motion (the claim is 23 feet from the camera) or sound detection. Then the cameras record the next ten seconds. When you purchase the camera, you get a free week’s worth of video storage in the cloud, after that you have to purchase a storage plan if you want to keep the videos for any length of time. (You can access your video library easily at any time, shown here.) You can download these videos as MP4s, and also share them with Netgear. If you use the Pro models, they attach to a local controller, which has two USB slots where you can fit a USB thumb drive for local storage. The Go units have a microSD slot where you can store your video recordings.

The biggest new feature of the Pro/Go cameras is audio, and it is two-way so you can get an alert via email and then talk remotely to someone who has stopped by your lake house and knocked on your door when you aren’t home as an example. You can also set off a very loud alarm remotely if you see something amiss.

The Arlo setup comes with a free basic subscription plan. This covers up to five cameras and up to seven days of 1 GB of cloud storage for your recordings. There are a variety of paid consumer and business plans that up the level and duration of storage and the number of cameras per account, these start at $100/year per account. The cameras retail for $950 in a kit that includes six Pro cameras, several wall mount options, power chargers and a base station. A single camera system is $250. The Go camera on the Verizon cellular network retails for $350, plus $85 a month, provided you sign a two-year contract.

If you have an older Arlo setup, it probably isn’t worth it to upgrade to Pro or Go collection. If you are looking for a smart home webcam, you can certainly find cheaper models that will require some wiring, or use ordinary batteries. It might be worthwhile to have a single Arlo Pro or a Go in the case of the remote cabin without any Internet connection. If you don’t mind replacing batteries and don’t need the two-way audio, you should stick with the older Arlo models.

When anonymous web data isn’t anymore

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One of my favorite NY Times technology stories (other than, ahem, my own articles) is one that ran more than ten years ago. It was about a supposedly anonymous AOL user that was picked from a huge database of search queries by researchers. They were able to correlate her searches and tracked down Thelma, a 62-year old widow living in Georgia. The database was originally posted online by AOL as an academic research tool, but after the Times story broke it was removed. The data “underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines,” said the Times story.

In the intervening years since that story, tracking technology has gotten better and Internet privacy has all but effectively disappeared. At the DEFCON trade show a few weeks ago in Vegas, researchers presented a paper on how easy it can be to track down folks based on their digital breadcrumbs. The researchers set up a phony marketing consulting firm and requested anonymous clickstream data to analyze. They were able to actually tie real users to the data through a series of well-known tricks, described in this report in Naked Security. They found that if they could correlate personal information across ten different domains, they could figure out who was the common user visiting those sites, as shown in this diagram published in the article.

The culprits are browser plug-ins and embedded scripts on web pages, which I have written about before here. “Five percent of the data in the clickstream they purchased was generated up by just ten different popular web plugins,” according to the DEFCON researchers.

So is this just some artifact of gung-ho security researchers, or does this have any real-world implications? Sadly, it is very much a reality. Last week Disney was served legal papers about secretly collecting kid’s usage data of their mobile apps, saying that the apps (which don’t ask parents permission for the kids to use, which is illegal) can track the kids across multiple games. All in the interest of serving up targeted ads. The full list of 43 apps that have this tracking data can be found here, including the one shown at right.

So what can you do? First, review your plug-ins, delete the ones that you really don’t need. In my article linked above, I try out Privacy Badger and have continued to use it. It can be entertaining or terrifying, depending on your POV. You could regularly delete your cookies and always run private browsing sessions, although you do give up some usability for doing so.

Privacy just isn’t what it used to be. And it is a lot of hard work to become more private these days, for sure.

Securing the smart home, a guide to my reviews series

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I began a series of reviews for Network World on securing the smart home. These three articles were published earlier this year:

Since then, I have written additional stories, but before I introduce those I want to take a step back and review the decision process that I would recommend in terms of what gear you should buy and at what point during your smarter home networking automation journey. And let’s also take a moment and review the decisions that you have made so far on hubs and wireless access points and how these decisions can influence what you buy next.

While there is no typical decision process for this gear, here are a series of five questions that you should have begun thinking about:

  1. Do you already own a smart thermostat? If not, make sure you pick the one that will work with your hub device. Nest doesn’t work with Apple’s HomeKit, for example. I will talk about my experience with Nest in a future installment. Also, you might also want to make sure that you can upgrade your older thermostat with something more intelligent, in terms of wiring and network access.
  2. Are you in the market for a new TV? If you are, consider what your main motivation is for buying one and which ecosystem (Apple, Google or Amazon) you want to join and use as your main entertainment provider. It used to be that buying a TV was a major purchase, but today’s flat screens are relatively inexpensive. Most new TVs come with wireless radios and built-in software to connect with Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming providers too.
  3. Are most of your cellphones Android or iOS? While many of the smart home products work with apps on both kinds of phones, that doesn’t necessarily mean that features are at parity between the two phone families. In some cases, vendors will prefer one over the other in terms of their app release schedule and that could be an issue depending on which side you are on. If you are serious about considering Apple HomeKit products, obviously you will need at least one Apple phone for managing its basic features. While Apple’s ecosystem supports the largest collection of smart home devices, overall, many of the smart home products will work on either Google Home or Amazon Alexa as well.
  4. Do you have sufficient wireless and wired infrastructure to support where you want to place all your devices? As I mentioned in my last installment, one of the major reasons for using a better wireless infrastructure like the Linksys Velop is because of its wider radio coverage area. Make sure you understand what your spouse is willing to tolerate in terms of wiring and AP placement too while you are assembling your new network requirements and scouting out potential AP locations around your home. As part of this decision, you might also need to upgrade your ISP bandwidth plan if you are going to be consuming more Internet services such as video and audio streaming.
  5. Do you have enough wired ports on your network switch? With all the devices that you plan on using, you probably are going to run out of wired ports. And while you might think that most smart home products are connected wirelessly, many require some kind of wired gateway device (the Philips Hue is an example here) that will consume a wired Ethernet port.

Those five questions should help get you started on your smart home journey. But before you purchase anything else, you might want to consider these security issues too.

  1. Do you understand the authentication requirements and limitations of each smart home app? One of the biggest limitations of the smart apps is how they set up their security and authentication. In many cases, the app can only use a single login ID and password. If you want multiple family members to use the app, you may have to share this information with them, which could be an issue. You might want to consider a document that lays out your family “rights management” — do you want your kids to be able to remotely control your thermostat or monitor your home security cameras? What about your spouse? This begs the next question:
  2. Who in the family is authorized to make changes to your smart infrastructure? By this I mean your network configuration and access to your computers, printers, and other IT gear. Again, in the past once this was set up it wasn’t often changed by anyone. But the smart home requires more subtle forms of access and this could be an issue, depending on the makeup of your family and who is the defacto family IT manager.
  3. You should plan for the situation when you (or another family member) loses their phone with all of your connected apps and authentication information. This is one of the major security weaknesses of the smart home: your apps hold the keys to the kingdom. Most of the apps automatically save your login info as a convenience, but that also means if you lose your phone, it can be a massive inconvenience. Some of these apps will only work when they are on your local network, but others can reach out across the Internet and do some damage if they fall into the wrong hands. Given how often your family members lose their phones (I know of one 20-something who loses her phone twice a year), this might be worthwhile. You might want to record the procedures for resetting your passwords on your various connected apps and other login information.
  4. What happens when one of your smart devices is compromised? The reports earlier this year about the compromised web server that comes with a Miele dishwasher are somewhat chilling, to say the least. How can you detect when a smart device is now part of a botnet or is running some malware? We will have some thoughts later in the series, but just wanted to raise the issue.

As you can see, making your home network smarter also means understanding the implications of your decisions and the interaction of products that now could create some serious family discussions, to say the least.

The remaining reviews in the series include:

The smart home series: Nest is building a smarter thermostat

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If the Philips Hue smart light bulb is the first connected home product, probably the most desired home networking product is the smart thermostat. While Nest wasn’t the first in the field, it has become the market leader and was purchased by Google back in 2014. One of the reasons why I chose my test home in suburban St. Louis was because the homeowners already had one installed. I wanted to see how it would interact with the Google Home and Alexa Echo units and what other equipment it would integrate with.

Nest is like many smarthome products: there is the actual thermostat itself, an attractive low-slung cylinder that has a built-in 480×480 pixel touch screen and a rotating collar for its main menu controls. Then there is a smartphone app and a web service. The apps run on both Android and IoS devices. (iOS 8 or later, or Android 4.1 or later)

Nest can’t replace all analog thermostat installations, but there is this helpful page that will walk you through what you have now and how your existing thermostat is wired to figure it out. They also have an installation video and troubleshooting tips. My home owners are moderately handy and they had no issues getting it installed. In my informal poll of other Nest users, I didn’t hear any horror stories either.

Once you wire it up to your HVAC system, you have to download its app to your phone and get the software setup. That took about 15 minutes. You can control up to 20 different thermostats and in two different locations from one app and one account. Unlike other smart home products,

Nest allows this account to grant access to two users with two separate email addresses. You still may want to use a throwaway email address to share among your family, if they have authority to change your home temperature conditions. It connects to your home network via Wi-Fi and like other products, initial setup is via Bluetooth.

We set up the Nest with both Alexa and Google Home. Nest doesn’t directly work with Apple’s HomeKit although there is this workaround. We also set up Nest with the ADT Pulse alarm system app that was installed in our test home. More on these connected apps in a moment.

Nest calls its product a learning thermostat, and this is because it automatically figures out your usage patterns on a daily basis. For example, the new generation units will light up to greet you when you come home. You can wait a couple of weeks for it to learn your schedule, or set up a typical schedule like any programmable thermostat. But unlike an analog thermostat, it has a series of sensors, as you might imagine. Besides temperature, it also measures humidity, activity and ambient light. That means it can make smarter decisions about your occupancy and usage patterns. That is one of its chief selling points.

Nest has some built-in routines that help you save money on your heating and cooling bills, called Nest Sense. It has all sorts of automated routines here. One is called Eco Temperatures. Basically, you set up a temperature range that your home will operate at, and if no one is home that is the default mode of operation. Others are called Cool to Dry, Leaf, Airware, Home/Away Assist, and Time-to-temp.

The Nest phone app is cleanly organized and once you get done setting up these various routines, you probably won’t be spending much time with it. With my test homeowners, one said she is so ingrained in using the thermostat directly that when she walks by it in her hallway she thinks about changing the temperature then. The other said he used both the Nest app and the voice commands but still was getting used to using both of them. Part of the issue here is that unlike lighting that you change frequently during the day, you probably don’t think about your home temperature control very often.

Another selling point for Nest is that it has a large range of other products that integrate with it. That is what drove my test homeowners to buy it since it works with their ADT security system. One of my homeowners used the ADT/Nest control because she forgot her Nest app password. So it is nice to have all these different mechanisms to control it, to be sure.

Finally, Nest was easy to setup with both the Amazon Alexa and Google Home, taking less than five minutes to get each one configured. Using it was simple too, and both seemed to perform the same way in terms of controlling the thermostat. My male homeowner said he is starting to prefer the Amazon hub for home control, just because it has so many more connected apps. But he finds the Google hub provides him with more thorough answers to his questions.

Nest is now on their third generation product, which retails for $249. (I tested the second generation.) But don’t let that price scare you: your local electric or gas utility might have rebate offers. (In St. Louis, it was $125 from both companies combined). It comes in four colors.

The smart home series: Philips Hue lighting system review

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In today’s installment, I look at the Philips Hue lighting system. This has four main components: a network-attached bridge or controller, the smart bulbs themselves, web-based software and the smartphone software that is used to turn your lights on and off. We tested the product in the same suburban home location outside of St. Louis where we tested our earlier products, connecting Hue to both the Alexa Echo Dot and the Google Home hubs.

Hue comes with three different kinds of bulbs: white-only, white ambiance and multi-color, which includes white. The White Ambiance allows you to do more than just dim up and down at the one color temperature and gives you access to 50,000 shades of white light. I tested the multi-color. Both come with built with radios that communicate via the ZigBee LightLink protocols back to the bridge.

To me, a lamp is a necessary evil and something that doesn’t require a great deal of thought. This is because I am someone with zero sense of interior design. I tell you this upfront, which is one of the reasons I was testing these products at a home where both residents have a lot more design-savvy and understanding of lighting placement and mood creation.

If you are a design philistine like me, then you probably won’t get much out of this product and should just stick with ordinary lamps. But if you do take the plunge, make sure you are buying what Philips calls “gen 3” bulbs (which is what I tested). These bulbs have deeper green, cyan and blue for even better mood setting. Philips claims the bulbs can deliver 16 million different colors, but since I am colorblind I couldn’t verify this claim. Nevertheless, you have a wide color palette that you can play with on your smartphone and have a lot of fun finding that exact color to match your mood, your decor, what your spouse is wearing, or whatnot. All the bulbs are LEDs, so are very energy-efficient. They all fit into a standard base and (unlike the early CF bulbs) are small enough to fit in most ordinary lamp housings.

Why bother with smart bulbs? Several reasons. First, you can remotely turn them on and off, both instantly and on a specified schedule, to make your home more comfortable and secure. Second, you can set various moods by having them dim or brighten appropriately. And finally, you have bragging rights when you have your friends over for dinner or parties. By now many of you have already bought your own smart hub: this gives you the first practical application that can readily demonstrate its utility.

When I first got the Hue kit I thought it was mostly “nice to have” but not an essential use case. The more I and my test couple used them, the more we liked them and the more we came to rely on the ability to control them at will and to set different moods. I think this bears emphasis: Hue is creating something new and really giving you a new dimension on how you live and consume lighting in your home.

You don’t need a smart hub to operate your Hue lights, because you can control them via the smartphone app  (shown here) or you can also purchase a variety of hardware controllers that can fit inside a standard light switch receptacle or sit on your coffee table if you want a physical object. That is all well and good, but really that gear is just a glorified “Clapper” device that is about as exciting. But using the Alexa or Google Home hubs means you have voice commands for your lights. This means you don’t have to look for your phone and can just turn your lights on or off quickly as you enter a room.

Getting setup from scratch took about 15 minutes on either hub, using a very similar process. The biggest issue I faced was switching my lighting system from the Amazon to the Google hub, which a normal user wouldn’t necessarily do. If you are going to change hub vendors, you should do a factory reset to make things easier. The controller/bridge connects to your home network via Wi-Fi, and it also works with Apple Home Kit hubs too.

The most important part of the hub-related setup is naming your various rooms where the bulbs will be located. The workflow for doing this is different in Amazon Alexa versus the Google Home. With Alexa, it picks up this information from the Hue app. In Google, you have to create your room names on its app.

For the most part, the Hue bulbs worked fine with either Alexa or Google Home. But sometimes Alexa would make a mistake, thinking a particular bulb was on when it was off, or vice-versa. And sometimes Alexa would turn on a bulb in the wrong room. We couldn’t reproduce these errors. It isn’t clear who is at fault here: because sometimes the app shows a bulb is on when it is off. For the majority of time though, things work as intended.

If you are just going to control your lights locally — meaning while you are in your home — then you don’t have to worry about the web server piece of the product. This is needed for two purposes: first for controlling your lights when you are away from home, and second to integrate with any Nest products and other home automation web services. For either purpose you will need to create an account on meethue.com and then use that login on your smartphone app. As with other smart home products, only one account (meaning one email address) per home is allowed. If you want multiple family members to have lighting controls, you might want to create a special email address that everyone can access. Philips is looking into having multiple accounts with different access rights at some point in the future.

Once you get going with the standard bulbs, Philips makes a bunch of different other bulb sizes that can you expand your horizons and play interior decorator. I didn’t test any of these. You can purchase a rechargeable portable light source called Go and lights that come with a variety of their own decorative bases. Given that Philips has been making electric lights for more than a century, this is not unexpected that there will be others joining its Hue product line in the near future.

Hue comes in various product configurations, the basic white-only starter kit with two bulbs and the controller is $70. It is available online and in a variety of electronics and lighting stores too.