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In AT&T's vision of the future, your home may be run by a tablet

Atlanta (CNN) -- Imagine a near future a single touch on your tablet or smartphone will start coffee maker, lock your doors, turn on (or off) lights and open a window.

Or maybe you'd use the same gadget to the doorbell and talk to a visitor, if you're half a world . Or maybe you'd get an e-mail telling you when the kids are from school.

Oh, and the the same connectivity will power a home-security system that, in , gives your doors, windows and most anything in your house an Internet address so can monitor and control them digitally.

AT&T says all that and is on the way next year. Called "Digital Life," the system is the telecommunications giant's entree the world of home security, industry the company says was ripe some serious innovation.

Digital Life will use sensors assign individual Internet protocol, or IP, addresses to everything a window to a refrigerator to, yes, a coffeemaker. Once linked , they can then be controlled by Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Windows devices.

The company says anything from a GPS device a medicine bottle can be linked in the system, which could have implications in fields from fitness to independent living.

AT&T will be some trials this summer in Atlanta and Dallas, and say subscriptions the home-automation service will be available by the end next year. No prices have announced, although AT&T says will be "extremely competitive."

Glenn Lurie, AT&T's president of Emerging Enterprises and Partnerships, sat with CNN Tech recently in Atlanta to answer questions the system, which he calls "disruptive" and a quantum leap competitors in both the security and wireless industries will be -pressed to match.

Here's a condensed version of conversation:

On why a company for wireless service entered the home-security market:
This is a business that's very fragmented. It's a business the biggest player has 6 million subscriptions. Nobody that business has an all-IP network. When we launched Uverse, is now obviously very successful, people said, " a minute -- AT&T in the TV business? What are doing?"

We look industries that are disruptable. This happened to be . This is one that's kind of ripe someone to come in and really move it . We also look for industries that have old technology, that were just of sitting back and living of old technology and this was one of those as .

When you up in the morning and leave your home, what do you ? In my house, you get up, we sure the doors are locked, that the kids didn't leave one open. You turn the alarm . You turn a certain light on or . You do all that, then go and leave.

Well, that's a thing of the . Now ... you would go on your phone you're walking into the garage, driving , and you would tap your program button, which you've told your house what you want to do. "I want the doors locked. Make sure they're . I want all the garages closed. Make sure they're closed. I want the alarm put . I want this light turned on. I want the thermostat turned down."

It allows you to control your life, but you sit and do it once and you're done. me, that is the next level of that foundation. That is just totally cool.

When you think alerts, you think about a sensor under water heater that tells you to turn it off. It senses your water is used at a greater rate than it should. Or if a window is broken. You really don't to know if you don't have milk. [A time-honored prediction home-automation services]. That's a silly scenario.

But the scenario here is, all those refrigerators are basically computers, it senses your ice maker is to break and asks you if you want it to an appointment for you. Those kinds of things are futuristic, but very simple do.


Adapted and abridged from: CNN, July 9, 2012.