BT has seen the future, and it's white

It's been an important week for BT. The company has launched its biggest marketing campaign since it started pushing broadband heavily in 2002. The new hard sell is the Total Broadband Experience -- a magic white box that provides a fast broadband connection and a wireless network connection to become 'the heart of your digital home'. You might be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft had already offered to provide this domestic organ with the Media Center PC. BT's move is in fact the latest in a fascinating game of marketing Go, in which technology vendors keep trying to surround each other, sneaking warily around our coffee tables in the quest to dominate our digital home lives.

It's painfully true that everything we do reveals our self, and this is never more apparent than at staged technology events, where sets are dressed and artificial environments created to give colour and context to the technology on offer. At BT's Total Lifestyle day on Wednesday, press and analysts were invited to learn more about the company's new products in a space carefully dressed to feel like all Apple's previous marketing campaigns. Even one BT representative admitted that it was "all a bit Apple-y". Indeed, BT has taken on board the general consensus that the future is going to be white and thin with round corners and nothing but a touch of gleaming chrome to relieve the whiteness. White leather? Check. Giant silver angle-poise lamp? Check. Giant Italian silver fan? Check. White spherical chairs with orange cushions? Check. It was like a tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey provided by Ikea.

The centrepiece of this digital fashion show was the BT Home Hub, a broadband router with integrated Wi-Fi, as well as the ability to support a whole range of integrated services, such as Web-based phone calls, video phones, home security systems, and eventually a new planned Internet television service called BT Vision.

As you would expect, the BT Home Hub is white and has rounded corners. Although nothing like as easy on the eye as Apple's white, UFO-shaped AirPort Wi-Fi hub, it's a good deal more house-trained than the average Belkin router. It seemed a perfectly sensible device. In fact, all the kit on display looked pretty fun: cute video phones with pop-up screens, a free BT SoftPhone as a riposte to Skype. There was nice integration with BT's Fusion technology, which allows seamless switching between a mobile GSM handset and a VoIP call over the wireless network, free during the evenings and weekends if you have the right call plan. It's all stuff we've seen before in various guises, of course, but BT has the opportunity to bring it all together in a compelling package.

I definitely found myself nodding at some of this. My wife glares with disdain at my ugly Telewest cable modem and cute AirPort wireless hub. The BT Hub would turn two devices into one and get rid of some more cabling. If we had a video phone at home, all of our techy friends overseas could use the BT SoftPhone application to admire our son, and my wife wouldn't have the hassle of booting up a computer she hates using.

I also like the sound of BT Fusion. Juggling the address book on our phone at home and the address book on my mobile gets to be a pain, and having one phone with one number that I can use cheaply when I'm at home at the evening and at weekends is a sensible idea. You can have up to six handsets in the house and be making up to three calls simultaneously, so what's not to like?

Success as always will depend on getting the price and execution right, along with all the little things that turn this week's shiny white vision with nice round corners into next week's slightly dated missed boat. And it's hard not to be cynical when you see a video phone, a vision of tomorrow we've been fed for years.

What I like about BT's overall vision is that for many ordinary consumers they may be the kind of company best positioned to handle the knottiest problem of the digital home, which isn't yet video calling: it's getting the wretched network to work at all. BT claims that 40 per cent of its broadband customers want wireless connectivity, and as anyone who's set up a network at home knows it can be a right pain getting Wi-Fi to do its thing. An integrated, stylish magic box (in white, with round corners) from your broadband provider could make all that go away. It's not really the PC that's at the heart of the digital home: the heart of the digital home is the network. At BT's demo day they had a room annexed off to demonstrate gaming, in which an earnest youth with a demographic-appropriate hairstyle showed off the wonders of Xbox Live via Wi-Fi. The Xbox 360, like the PC, is just another slave node on the master's network.

Although BT Vision, an ambitious punt into the world of entertainment, might be something of a stretch for an engineering-led company, the Total Broadband Experience is founded on solid ground that plays to BT's core strengths, even if the company's execution of the giddy digital lifestyle sometimes seems forced. In the Xbox demo room at Wednesday's event one wall had been covered with the kind of ker-ay-zee toys that hip and happening kids like to get down with. One toy, I noted with a shudder, was the archetypal Nathan Barley dot-com silver scooter, a staggeringly naff thing to display as a style note in 2006. I suppose it seemed a bit Apple-y at the time.