In Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, many residences are larger than some office parks, which means that their need for professional-grade technology and entertainment equipment is equally pronounced. Once homeowners found themselves working from home during the pandemic, along with all the kids at home demanding to be entertained or to stream their lessons from school, they realized that their home networks needed to work well everywhere, all the time. That’s when they called Luke Thompson, owner of Wise Automation, a residential technology integrator based in Northern VA.
As Luke describes his superpower, “After working in commercial IT for 13 years I can tell you, It all starts with the network. We don’t come out to your house just to make sure your Alexa works and your light bulbs are synchronized. Our approach is much more in-depth, starting with the very core of the network. My typical customer is saying, ‘I can’t make Zoom calls from my home office’, ‘Why is the wifi weak upstairs?’, ‘how do we get wifi/audio/tv outside to another area?’ Somewhere along the line, the network is not functioning correctly or designed optimally.”
As for what “the network” looks like, Luke admits, “It probably works best when you don’t see it!” Nevertheless, he did a great job of showing us an example of what a residential network he worked on looked like both before and after he brought it to peak performance. In this particular case, the homeowner’s property consisted of the main home, a guest house, the pool and the pool house, each with audio speakers, video, wifi, and personal cell phones needing access to the wired and wireless networks. All that functionality should run seamlessly but most of it was installed piecemeal to serve just one segment of the entertainment or office system at once. With everything running simultaneously, the network was easily overwhelmed.
“For the most part, no residential networks are meant to handle that kind of data load consistently throughout the house,” Luke said. “Consumers are discovering that the infrastructure just isn’t there, or it wasn’t set up optimally to handle those scenarios. We go in and either add to or redesign their system to function the way it’s supposed to, which is all the time from everywhere.”
In Luke’s projects for ambassadors, government officials and corporate executives – all of whom conduct critical business from home – network security also comes with the job. “We use commercial-level firewalls and active cybersecurity filtering to analyze the traffic as it goes in and out of the house to ensure that viruses aren't getting in, and that the network isn’t sending data out somewhere else.” These systems and where they are utilized have grown so much in recent years, that they’ve even spawned a new term: “Resimercial.”
This concept covers a network that may be housed in a residence, but that operates with commercial scale and reliability. “We just did a 25,000-square-foot home. The scale of everything was so large it felt more like a hotel. We installed 24 wifi access points and 20 TVs. At that scale, you can see that if there are faulty loops in the network or damaged cables or interference to the wifi, it doesn’t take much to make the network completely unusable.... We build things from scratch so they’re reliable from the get-go.”
The process usually involves simplification. Luke typically centralizes network operations from the basement where each system interconnects into a central junction running over specialty hardware that can route all data over the network. “Instead of a million buttons, you just have a few to control.” He understands that most of his clients don’t want to feel like they’re on Star Trek and have to master a dozen devices. “They just want to push a button and have the TV turn on.”
For Luke, the job usually starts with an email, so drop him a line at lthompson@wiseautomation.com and tell him what’s not working. He’ll know what lies beneath, and how to fix it.