Home Networks and Cybersecurity

Hello and welcome to Talking Home Renovations with The House Maven, I’m your host, Katharine MacPhail. I’m an architect practicing in Eastern Massachusetts. I specialize in additions and renovations to existing homes, and this podcast is meant for homeowners who are getting ready to undergo a home renovation and would like to learn everything they can before they start.

In this episode, I talk with Michael Oh about robust home networks and cybersecurity. It is not a topic that I know much about, so I appreciate that Michael was very patient with me. His company TSP is out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they’ve done some award-winning work, which I will link to in the show notes.

They also have a blog and a tech podcast called Grepcast. For those who want a deeper dive again, I’ll post those links. Check them out. And here’s my conversation with Mike.

K: Well, thanks Mike for joining me today.

M: No problem.

K: Right now you’re in the UK. You had started this company in 1992, is that when you were at MIT?

M: Yeah, absolutely. So I was an undergraduate at MIT. I was born and raised in Alabama of all places. I moved to Boston as a student, and basically wanted to make a little bit of extra money on the side, so started the business just to help people out with tech. To give you some context, the internet didn’t really exist. I mean, certainly none of the social media, Facebook, all that kind of stuff. So it’s really like literally starting by getting people on the internet, purchasing a domain name, getting them email, all that kind of stuff. So that’s kind of how I started. And then, you know, as the technology grew, as the internet grew, that was really where my business grew as well.

K: I remember moving from California where we had like an in-school network for email, kind of. There was only AOL that I could get outside of school. And that was just like really lame chat rooms. I realized, why am I wasting my time chatting to random strangers when I have more interesting conversations at school? We moved to Massachusetts and I was trying to find an internet provider and people were literally saying to me, what is the internet? This was in early 96. And then I remember 411, you could call up and ask them for a number for something. So then she had no idea what I was talking about either. It was weird.

M: Tech superpowers was the name of the company back then. We’ve sort of shortened it since obviously grown up a little bit. And yeah, now almost 30 years later, we’re doing IT still. That’s a really big part of our business. We’re doing smart homes, we’re doing cybersecurity. Most of our customers are based in the Boston area. So some big names like the Celtics are a client of ours, matrix partners, which is kind of a hedge fund, an investment firm. And lots of other smaller companies, you may know Reed Hilderbrand, they’re landscape architects. So they’re a client of ours as well.

K: I don’t get out much, actually. We were going to talk about building a robust network and cybersecurity for the home.

M: Yep.

K: You and I had been talking and you’d mentioned that previously, this was for really high end homes.

M: Yep. And now it’s really ended up becoming something that everybody cares about. It used to be that when people built homes, renovated homes, the only thing they really cared about was where does Comcast come into the house? That’s where they’re going to install the modem and that modem provides wifi for the house. And I think what we’ve all found out in pandemic times is that the home networks are a really big part of basically what it is that we do. I mean, it’s part of school, part of work, not to mention checking social media for what’s going on in the world. I mean, it all revolves around that internet connection. I think it used to be that it was okay if it was kind of slow. It was okay if, you know, things were a little slower at home than they were at work. But now, like with two kids, I mean, we’ve got two kids on Google Classroom every day. Me and my wife, we’re both doing zooms, phone calls, the whole bit. The infrastructure in the home is arguably more critical than any infrastructure that we have in the office, at least right now, you know?

K: I know nothing about it, to be honest, I just have wireless. I shouldn’t even say what I have for security around here.

M: It’s the same, it’s the same as everybody else has. You get the things from Comcast, from Verizon and that’s your internet at home. But I think what we’ve all found is, particularly when you’re working with larger homes and when you have people that have budgets for renovations or people that are doing larger construction work, they’re generally doing things in a larger home and, you know, one access point from Comcast and then maybe a couple of little repeaters that they give you or whatever. It’s not enough to really give good speed. And part of it is that the technology has developed over the last few years. So what used to be kind of okay for having Wi-Fi in a home, especially a small one was fine. It doesn’t work anymore because number one, you know, there’s so many other people that have wifi around you, so there’s a lot of interference. So what may have used to work when you were kind of at the edge of your house, or maybe a couple of rooms away from the router used to be fine. It really doesn’t work anymore. And then the other thing is that the speeds on internet at home are getting so much faster that the more traditional wifi technologies and ones that have longer range really can’t keep up with those speeds. So the newer technologies that depend on the five gigahertz bandwidth, and those types of things actually have much shorter distances to give you the faster performance. So that’s kind of why now, especially if you have a larger home, you need companies like us to help you think about these things, if not design and implement your network.

K: So larger home and smaller home, what are their square footages? so people can get an idea of what’s a larger home. So like a 2,400 square foot home, which I don’t know if that’s even still the average size for a home, but would that be a small home?

M: For us, yeah. For us it’s a small home. That being said, and I’m sure you’ve seen the trends, you have lots of people from five or 6,000 square foot homes moving into Boston. And these are people that move downsizing to 2,500, 3000 square foot homes. in many ways really requiring the very best. One of our clients lives in the back Bay, he works for a firm and his 3000 square foot, you know, it’s an apartment, but it’s essentially like an entire floor of a brownstone in the back Bay. It has five or six access points. And so, it’s not that everybody in that size needs that many access points, it’s that if you really want the best network performance throughout every corner of your house and at the fastest speeds, then that’s kind of what it looks like. And that’s very different from what most people get from Comcast or Verizon, which has one or two little access points. You put it in the center of the house and hope for the best.

K: So I’m going to ask you a really stupid question. When you’re saying access points, do you mean, like, is it still a wireless system or do you mean that’s where you would plug into a network? Is it an ethernet sort of thing? Is that even what that’s called?

M: Yeah. So it’s basically a wifi access point. In this kind of scenario, it’s a device that plugs into the wall and then transmits wifi from that location. So if you imagine any house, you’d want actual physical copper wiring to run to three or four or five different spots in the house where you physically plug in one of these devices and then that’s providing wifi. So instead of having one wifi access point or source within a house, you really have three or four or five that are each covering maybe a couple of rooms at the fastest speed. So, that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

K: Okay. So it sounds like it would need to be a full renovation sort of situation where it’s just a gutted house, or at least it’s down to the studs. You could just rewire the whole thing because you actually have to wire it.

M: You do have to wire it. Yeah.

K: So you can’t just go ahead and add it. If someone listening just thought I would like-

M: You can. You know, actually there’s some incredible electricians out there that can feed wire through even some of these brownstones without having any of the walls open. It’s some sort of magic, but we’ve seen it done. And I think especially it’s people that really know a property well, and they sort of know the constructions, which way the joists are going, and they can kind of figure out what’s the best wire path to do that stuff. One of our clients, they got a bunch of work done in a back Bay house. They didn’t have to open up all the walls, but they’d have to poke holes in certain areas. But these are holes that you can easily patch and paint and it doesn’t require a huge amount of work. So there are ways to do it if you want a wire, but you don’t want to have to go back to the studs, like you said. That’s totally doable.

K: Some people aren’t planning to do that anytime soon. Tell me about cyber security. Does the average person have to worry about cybersecurity? I tend to not think about it very much.

M: Yeah. They call it kind of your risk profile or your threat model in the cybersecurity world. Everybody’s threat model differs. In the sense that if somebody were to hack your bank account versus my bank account, versus one of our client’s bank accounts, it’s a very different set of numbers. And so, I wouldn’t say that everybody listening is absolutely going to have to invest in cybersecurity equipment or the best network stuff, but I think what we’ve seen as a trend is businesses have traditionally spent thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars on getting secure networking equipment and cybersecurity infrastructure. But all of that stuff by and large is laying dormant. There are people still going to the office depending on the industry and whatnot, but the vast majority of the people that I talk to on a day-to-day basis are still working at home and still operating and doing the exact same thing. So they’re making wire transfers, these are people that are maybe working in an accounting department or work for a business approving wire transfers. And these are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars things that are happening, that are now going through home networks. And it’s not to say that just because they’re going through a home network that they’re, you know, being hacked into, but you sort of think all that money that’s been invested in proper cyber security is being completely bypassed. And the people that we work with are sort of thinking, well, now may really be the time for me to at least get a little cybersecurity audit at home. Sort of see what’s on my network, understand what kind of devices have access to the outside world and get a little bit of an assessment of my risk in cybersecurity. And that’s actually been a big growth part of our business for the last year or so as people have been looking at how they’re using these home networks

K: A lot has changed in the last year or two with how people are using their home networks, like you were saying. I guess it’s a pretty straightforward question, but I always feel a little rude asking, how much does this kind of thing cost?

M: Well, one of the most important things is just making sure that you’ve got the most recent stuff. And it doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of money, it just means that the Comcast modem and the wifi access point or router that you bought from Best Buy seven years ago that’s still running your network may not necessarily be the best in terms of cyber security. There’s a lot of companies that do tremendous amounts of research on specific devices. And over the years, there’s many different types of devices be they cameras or routers or different pieces of network equipment that security researchers have found bugs and holes in. And from our standpoint, when we walk into a larger house that may have multiple network devices, but they’re still running on equipment that’s three to five years old, it’s a major risk factor for us. Because usually those manufacturers, especially if you didn’t spend a lot of money on it, they aren’t really releasing you bug fixes or security patches for those devices. So if you went and got your Comcast service a couple of years ago and are using one of their X1 modems that they just make as part of the service, that’s pretty secure. By most standards, it’s going to be good enough for most people at home. But there are of course users that are absolutely willing to spend much more. And to give you an example, we had one client that recently spent five figures on upgrading their network.

K: So five figures, that’s 10,000 or more.

M: Yeah. And it was multiple 10 thousands because at the end of the day, they wanted much better wifi coverage. They had really poor wifi coverage, and they also wanted systems that were business class. So these are the same manufacturers and the same types of equipment that the Celtics are putting in their office. This customer was putting it at home and the Celtics are doing it because their threat model is, you know, somebody gets hacked, it’s a very bad thing and it can cost them a lot of money. And it’s the same type of equation that some customers have, obviously that’s not all of us, but it is an investment that can definitely get up there as how much you want to protect yourself.

K: I would imagine that if you did install this kind of system in your house or wire it for this, then it would actually increase the resale value because in theory, other people like you would be buying your house and that would be a plus for them. So in a way it’s an investment in your house too.

M: Yeah, actually for anyone who’s renovating a home, one of the easiest ways to signal that you’ve really thought through technology is to sort of sit down with somebody like us, that designed smart homes. And even if you’re not putting together a smart home, ask where you should put the various types of wires, data wires, Cat 6, whatever needs to be put in there and where those locations are. Because when I walk into a home that maybe somebody’s just recently purchased and I see that somebody has actually thought through where those wireless access points might be installed, how they’re going to access a sort of central location where you might have more of your networking equipment, and that’s been thought through, to me that has value. Not only as a techie, but also as somebody that sort of thinks, okay well, If I want to make sure I’ve got good wifi in a home, absolutely having the right infrastructure is really important.

K: So what would be the next step, if someone listening to this thinks I want to implement this in my house. So then what do they do? Do they find a company that specializes in smart homes or is it a different type of company?

M: Well that’s probably our biggest challenge is that right now in this world, there really aren’t a category of provider, people in the trade that kind of provide this service. So us as a smart home company, we implement networks as part of smart home systems. I think a lot of other people that we see that have decent networks at home, they’re probably doing that through their connections at work. So they might work at a company where you have somebody who’s in the IT department that can help design a network. But there really isn’t- the smart home integrators, they are a little bit more aware of networking, but a lot of the ones that have been around for a long time, they’re also more in the AV space rather than networking space. So it is companies like ours that are sort of starting to pop up now that are really servicing the sort of networks at home, but it’s kind of a brand new category. So, we’re a little bit jammed with work and it’s just because everybody’s looking for connecting your home networks, lighting control, all of these different elements right now.

K: Like, what would the words be that they would Google, like tech network?

M: I think like you said, looking for a smart home integrator, that’s probably what you’d look for, what you’d Google. In the sense that that’s your most likely kind of named to service that would have awareness about these things. The other source is absolutely your architect. I think that as you’ve seen architects need to know people in every walk of the trades. From electricians to people that install networks to people that do smart home technology, a lot of architects are finding themselves being kind of at the hub of that recommendation. So that’s certainly a place to start.

K: Okay. Do you have any other advice for people who are just starting to think about what they need?

M: Well I would probably say that our biggest issue when we run into new opportunities is that people think about technology pretty much at the end of the project. And so there have been multiple times, I mean, literally in the last two weeks where I’ve had conversations with people and they said, well, the electrician is looking for a wiring layout that they’re going to start doing In the next two to three weeks. For me, my advice is that is way too late. I mean, we can scramble and we can take an existing electrical plan, mark it up, get something quick over to the electrician, and hopefully if they’re doing a good job be able to plug a few gaps. But honestly, from a technology standpoint, this isn’t just networking, but also smart home technology, lighting control. The earlier that we’re involved in the process, the better. So start with the architects, clearly that’s where you’re going to start with the structural design and how you can design your floor plan. But very quickly look for those recommendations, sort of say, well, I am interested in smart homes, or I am interested in having a robust network. Can you connect me with a couple people to have these discussions early, because if we’re involved in the design process, you know, just like there’s an electrical plan, there’s a low voltage plan. There’s a lighting control plan. This is very much part of what we do is that design process. And it’s not that expensive. I mean, what’s more expensive is to make changes later on. If the walls are plastered and painted and we need to run Cat 6, there are people that can do some magic, but ultimately that means patching, finishing, painting the whole thing, which you want to avoid.

K: Thank you for that. I’m hoping that getting people to start thinking about this is the key and then they can get into it more deeply and figure out how that applies to their house and everything else. I would love to have a more robust network here. Cause I’ve got a kid in virtual high school, A whole bunch of things like four other people in the house with me then I’m doing zoom calls and everything else, sometimes when I need to download things onto my iPad I need to walk over to the other side of the house… not convenient.

M: Yeah, exactly. Not convenient at all.

K: No. I mean it’s really small, you know, it’s like people are doing way more important things than I am. But I really appreciate you coming on and talking to me about it.

M: No problem. And we’re more than happy to talk to any of your listeners if they have questions about it too. I mean, we’re out there to help. We are busy and in the midst of lots of proposals and stuff, which, we’re very lucky to be doing that in the midst of what’s going on in the world. Coming from where I’ve come from, I know that success comes through just trying to be helpful, and even if it’s just answering questions that people have about it. Definitely have people get in touch.

K: So tell me what your website is or your social media.

M: Sure, yeah. So our website is tsp.space. It’s not .com, so tsp.space. And that’s our smart home website that has most of our social media and things, but we have @tsp_smart_spaces, which is on Instagram. But tsp.space is a great place to start. And my email address, if anyone wants to reach out, it’s just Oh@tsp.space. That’s where you can find us.

K: That’s great. Well, thank you very much.

M: Great. No, thanks for having me on it’s a great podcast that you’re running. I mean, I think you and I have talked about this a little bit before, we also run a podcast as well, but we’re kind of on a few month hiatus because I know how much work it is to run it, produce it, record it. And the fact that you’re trying to do this every week is so impressive. So thanks for having me on.

K: Thanks. Well, it’s a new thing every week, so we’ll see how that goes.

M: Yeah, exactly. Well, good luck.

Thanks again, Mike for spending time with me and for all of you for listening to this episode. Please join my mailing list if you’d like a special newsletter whenever I publish an episode. Link It’s in the show notes.

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