Outfits like Wired Magazine spent much of the nineties predicting intelligent refrigerators that would know when they were empty; washing machines that would call you when something was wrong; remote wireless sensors that would start the oven, open your garage door, and turn on the lights when they detected you arriving home after a busy day at the office. But the bursting of the dot-com bubble resulted in talk of smart homes being put on the shelf for a while. Telephony Online insists that the connected home is once again the rage, as ISPs look for new ways to compete:Of course while the article says that nearly every major ISP has plans in this space (cable more than telcos, the report claims) nobody is really deploying such managed services in any volume. Qwest has a website highlighting their connected home plans, which they say they'll expand in time. Many of the current offerings are simply focused on multimedia, or trying to make dying connectivity options (landlines) seem more relevant by sprucing them up.