Close your eyes and reach your hand out in front of you. With your eyes still closed, try to touch your pointer finger to your nose. Did they touch?

If your eyes were closed, how did you know where to move your finger? In fact, how did you know you still had a finger at all?

It might sound like an obvious question, but most of the time we don’t stop to think about how our bodies make this possible. Proprioception (proh·pree·uh·sep·shun) is an important sense, coordinated by an interaction between your central nervous system and peripheral tissues like muscles, tendons, and ligaments. It tells us where our body parts are located, and how they’re moving.

Your smart community should be designed the same way.

Smart building technology is the nervous system of your community.

In a human body, the brain is connected to the fingers through a web of nerves and neurons. You can imagine your community’s server as the brain, the individual suites as fingers, and the hardwired network as a web of nerves and neurons.

The WiFi is down in your community; imagine it as though you’ve entered a dark room and you can’t see your own hand a couple of inches in front of your face. Without that web of nerves and neurons to remind you that you still have fingers, you wouldn’t be able to lift your arm up and run your hand across the wall to find the light switch.

Similarly, if the suites in your community aren’t all hardwired to the dedicated server, your building won’t be able to coordinate important functions like sending video lobby calls to a suite’s wall pad or allowing residents to open the front door for their visitor.

If your body’s intricate web of neurons stopped at your spinal cord, you’d have no way to turn the lights back on. This is the downfall of the cloud or WiFi-based smart building system; if the brains of the building are not hardwired to every suite, an internet outage will leave residents in the dark.

Smart buildings of the future need a level of communication that extends to every metaphorical muscle, tendon, and ligament in order to allow all the moving parts to work together.

You can’t have a smart building without a network.