Tech fridge is recipe for running house the Net way

Forget the portable TV, basic cooking book and fresh pairs of Dunnes Stores socks. When they move out of the family home, truly hip parents might want to send off their sons and daughters with an Ericsson Internet-enabled ScreenFridge.

According to Ericsson, which showed off the wired fridge and its "kitchen-centric applications" in Dublin this week, the Screen Fridge can plan menus, run a video on how to prepare that chicken curry, and advise on how to run a load of washing. It also has an address book, calendar, screen phone, television services, controls for locking doors and windows and turning on alarm systems, recipe files, and a built-in video camera and speakers so that you can leave a video message rather than an oldstyle Post-It note on the fridge. And, of course, the ScreenFridge has a web browser.

Ericsson, which employs 2,500 in the Republic, was quick to explain it was not pursuing the Hotpoint market and that ScreenFridge was a once-off product. "We're not diversifying into fridges," said the company's Mr David King. "White goods is not part of the corporate plan." And alas, the fridge is unlikely to appear at your local appliance store, although it is already available if you live in Ericsson's home country, Sweden.

The company also demonstrated the WebScreen, a portable, booksize Internet-access tablet, which will network with other access devices such as the ScreenFridge or even a plain old desktop computer. Punters stand a better chance of owning a WebScreen than a ScreenFridge, as the product is scheduled for release this quarter. Unfortunately, it networks with other devices using Bluetooth, the hotly-hyped but as yet rarely used networking protocol, so it may be some time before it is talking to anything else in the house.

But such upper-end gizmos are just the window-dressing for a discussion of what the company is focused on: mobile phones and telephony infrastructure. While people talk about the Internet being the technology with the fastest adoption in history, the take-up of mobiles may overshadow that growth, said Ericcson's Mr Bjorn Rasmussen. More than 700,000 new subscribers get a mobile phone every day, he said, and by 2002 Ericsson expects one billion subscribers worldwide. In 1997, only 200 million were using mobiles globally.

Mobiles are being interlaced with other forms of data communications - telephony and Internet - to create new demands on telecommunications networks. Ericcson, which also makes a suite of networking products called Engine, expects to do well from growing demand for what it calls broadband multiservice networks - telecommunications networks that can handle a variety of data communication formats.

Eircom was the first client worldwide to adopt an Engine solution, said Ericsson. Eircom is upgrading several of its exchanges to better handle high-speed Internet access - at the moment, ISDN lines - but the exchanges are designed to manage digital subscriber line (DSL) technology in the future. Since the ScreenFridge normally runs on a DSL connection, it looks as if the Irish market will have to wait a while before watching Jamie Oliver videos on the refrigerator.