Un-structured wiring

I read several newsletters about the latest in home automation. The articles that interest me are not so much those that go into great depth about some new wireless protocol or a new digital format that DVD players can now support, but rather I look for articles that discuss trends and how new technologies will affect consumers. The latest issue from Home Toys > http://www.hometoys.com/htinews.htm < has yet another article about structured wiring. I guess my house has structured wiring, although much more eclectic than the fancy cabinets and expensive cabling that you see in new homes today. I've got distributed audio/video/phone/ethernet/and sprinkler wires going to a closet downstairs where I have my DSL modem and routers. Not pretty but fine for me.

The problem I have with spending $30k -$40k on all this stuff in a new home today is that the stuff that plugs into it in the family room and the office and the kitchen is all going to change before you know it. Who knows what kind of wiring you will need in ten years? Ten years is not that long if you are burying all this stuff in your walls. With the rate of change in the electronics industry, your ethernet cables may be totally inadequate to carry the bandwidth needed in the near future, and the way they typically install this wiring is just to route it through the walls either loose or in pre-packaged cables(e.g. 2 ethernet, 2 control, 1 coax, 2 speaker). The problem is that the guys who put these in, do it in such a way that you would have to rip off the drywall to replace it. If it was my home and I was standing there looking at the framing before any drywall was put in, I would insist on them installing conduit so I could pull it all out and replace it, maybe room by room, but at least with that capability.

There is so much hype about structured wiring but no one seems to know what is coming in 5-10 years. It's entirely possible that you might want to replace all of this wiring with just one fiberoptic cable going to each location. It would have enough bandwidth to carry virtually everything at the same time including HDTV, internet, lighting controls, phone, everything. And it would be easy to replace the module at the end to add features without changing any "wiring." I wonder what the incremental cost would be to add one fiberoptic cable to each run in that new house today even if you have nothing to hook it to yet?