Two Bedrooms, Swimming Pool, and Internet

Tania Hershman

Smart building -- the latest buzzword in the construction industry -- simply means an apartment complex that is wired for its own private network and Internet connection. The very first "smart apartments" have been built in Israel, and the idea could soon spread.

Tsamarot, located in Herzelyia on Israel's northern coastal plain above Tel Aviv, is a residential complex of four apartment blocks circling a swimming pool. Apartments start at $400,000, but these dwellings have something extra -- they are among the first in the world to be connected to the complex's own LAN to receive access to their own electronic forum, InfoGate .

When the b uildings were constructed, fiber-optic and copper cabling was installed along with telephone lines and television cable, permitting two-way data transfer of up to 100 Mbps. Every apartment has at least one point on the wall for connection to the network, which links all 240 apartments in all four blocks. A Compaq server sits in the basement of one of the four blocks. Server and network monitoring is done at InfoGate's nearby Tel Aviv headquarters.

Residents simply plug in their PC. For $40 a month, InfoGate's electronic forum provides residents of Tsamarot with unlimited e-mail and Internet use, with none of the bother of having to dial up. However, it is the local features of the InfoGate forum that make it attractive to the residents.

InfoGate is divided into rooms, within each of which is access to a variety of applications sitting on the server. In the Office is Microsoft Office (InfoGate is a Microsoft development partner) and an Israeli stock-exchange information program; on-line banking wil l shortly be operational. The Kitchen provides gourmet French recipes. The Living Room has reference materials such as Microsoft's Encarta.

Found in the Children's Room, together with educational games that are designed for schools by the Israeli Center for Educational Technology, is something more exciting: multiplayer gaming. "The network can provide very high-speed multimedia and even video as part of the content," says Hezi Kasif, who is the general manager of InfoGate. Younger household members can play Doom 2 with arcade-quality graphics and speed -- against players anywhere on the network around the country.

InfoGate is adding content daily and planning features such as tourist guides and on-line shopping in conjunction with the nearby mall. The lively graphical and musical interface, in either English or Hebrew, can be customized for rapid access to frequently used applications. Parental control can be exercised to limit gaming time, for example.

Three-year-old InfoGate, which is par tially owned by the president of the Israeli RAD group of networking companies, is looking to export the concept through franchisees, first in the U.S. and then in Europe.

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Where to Find

InfoGate

Tel Aviv, Israel
Phone:    +972 3 696 4347
Fax:      +972 3 691 8290
E-mail:   
hezi@mag-net.co.il


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The Residential Gate

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Through InfoGate, apartment residents have access to numerous applications.