If you buy a wired home in Calgary’s first e-community, don’t worry about the technology becoming outdated — you can always pull some plugs.
If wireless Internet comes on the market, you might need a small, generation-after-next dish in the attic. Genstar Development Co. Ltd. and the builders of its Panorama Hills subdivision in north Calgary have taken that into account.
They build a conduit from the attics to the IBM Home Director panels in the basements of the houses, says J. J. Macalino, project manager for smart-enabled homes at Genstar. The first show homes in the neighbourhood debuted Oct. 15th. Phone, cable and other services arrive in Panorama Hills homes at the Home Director panel, and are wired out to the rest of the house.
If new services become available, they can be added to the panel. The wiring has the capacity to take it. The cable used can run about 100 times as fast as current high-speed cable Internet, says Macalino. Future installers won’t be fishing more cable through the ducting.
The central distribution box is an advantage for homeowners. With the cable modem at the Home Director panel, all computers in the house can have cable Internet. A single DVD player can serve every television in the house.
All this connectivity adds only $1,400 or $1,500 to the price of a house, says Shane Wenzel, vice-president of sales and marketing for Shane Homes, one of five builders in Panorama Hills. (The others are Homes by Avi, Jayman Master Builder, Carolina Homes and Cardel Custom Homes.) It adds about a day to the building schedule.
Each builder chose a concept for Panorama Hills homes. Shane Homes picked home-management systems, says Wenzel. A control panel manages light and heat and is expandable to other systems. The Home Director itself can expand.
Macalino says the connectivity goes throughout the neighbourhood with an intranet for Panorama Hills only. Each street address comes with a password and login name for Neighbournet. Community meetings could be called and kids’ soccer practices scheduled on the intranet.
Genstar also plans an affinity discount buying program for neighborhood residents. The program could have a lot of clout, considering the economies of scale involved.
The map of the new subdivision shows about 18 years of work, says Marcello Chiacchia, development manager for Genstar. There will eventually be 6,000 residences in the community, 4,000 of them single-family.
Wenzel notes that with deregulation of community services, a community could act as a group in dealing with vendors. Potential savings of $500 to $600 a year could soon pay back the extra cost on the houses.
In the meantime, a virtual tour on the community Web site shows how it will appear in future. It’s not just a world of wires and data, but parks, shopping areas, school sites and more.
Chiacchia notes that Genstar has built innovative communities before, centring on lakes or golf courses.
“The meat and potatoes that make it a great community are all there,” he says. “It’s not just the technology,” says Macalino. “It’s all the other things that make a community.”
Tenants in Boardwalk Equities properties will have new video and phone choices when the company completes a new multimedia system.
Boardwalk picked Comlink Systems to provide a turn-key system for television, radio and audio signals to its tenants. Mass Geremia, investor relations manager for Boardwalk, says it is applying to the CRTC for the licence to supply video. It will soon apply for the competing local exchange carrier licence for the telephone service.
Tenants will have a choice as the new service competes with Shaw and Telus. The stand-alone service will be provided by a subsidiary called Suite Systems Inc.
The system will start in Calgary and then spread to other Boardwalk locations in the West, says chief technical officer Mark Kornak. A different “head end” or distribution centre, will be built for each city so the video will include local channels.
Boardwalk has 25,000 suites in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
Newly renovated Brentwood Village is almost fully leased, says Doug Grinde of Torode Realty Ltd. Except for one pocket, the property is taken. The last area of small bay units inside the enclosed mall is 60 per cent spoken for, says Grinde.
Tenants in the 300,000-sq.-ft. shopping centre include local and Western Canadian companies, he says. Businesses include a Canada Safeway store and a Sears furniture and appliance store.
Brentwood Village is at Crowchild Trail and Charleswood Drive N.W.
Web Watch:
www.mypanoramahills.com
www.genstarcanada.com
www.shanehomes.com
www.bwalk.com
