Lennar Corp., Miami (NYSE:LEN) has launched the nation's first Wi-Fi CERTIFIED homes, which integrate pre-installed wireless technology to provide coverage in every room with no dead spots.

The Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Home Design standard is an initiative of Wi-Fi Alliance, a worldwide network of companies that drives the adoption of wireless technology. Lennar is the first builder to adopt the standard. The Wi-Fi CERTIFIED homes bring a new kind of seamless, turnkey feature to the home building market with Wi-Fi that offers consistent and amplified coverage compared to a traditional boxed router.

"Wi-Fi has become one of the most widely used and successful technologies of our day. It delivers over half of all internet traffic, and it's absolutely foundational to connectivity today," says Kevin Robinson, Wi-Fi Alliance vice president of marketing, who notes that the average home has about 8 connected devices running between cell phones, tablets, and entertainment devices, and the industry is only continuing to add more. As such, consumers have come to expect that Wi-Fi is always available.

"Users want a seamless experience where the technology itself just fades into the background," Robinson continues. "That's when you're truly successful as a technology, when individuals can accomplish what they need to accomplish but they almost don’t even realize they're using the technology. That's the goal for us all, including home builders-- to provide a seamless, turnkey experience in their homes with a Wi-Fi network that meets high connectivity coverage and performance standards."

The process of creating a Wi-Fi CERTIFIED home puts every floor plan through a rigorous testing process that maps signal strength and quality to determine where to place access points, which are built right into the home during construction for maximum, uninterrupted coverage. The process takes into account the best kinds of enclosures for routers and the building materials and other factors that can affect connectivity. The home is the serviced with Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi technology, an affordable wireless LAN solution that can be deployed in minutes.

"As the home builder constructs the home, they're able to place access points wherever they make the most sense and where they will maximize performance, not where a service provider might happen to drop a cable gateway," says Robinson. "At Wi-Fi Alliance, we are able to do a 3rd-party, neutral evaluation to make sure the home is going to deliver a good experience and will just simply work for the owner."

The homes will also be fully integrated with home automation and voice control from Amazon Alexa, built right into the structure. Homeowners will be able to control their lights, front door lock, or thermostat, for example by talking to Alexa. Lennar has also partnered with leading manufacturers in the smart home space such as Ring, Honeywell, Kwikset, Lutron, and Samsung to integrate wireless home automation products that pair with Amazon Alexa into their new construction.

"Consumers that are excited about [Wi-Fi and home automation]. But what detracts from their excitement is complexity, and a challenge of the IoT industry has been demonstrating to consumers how simple this can be," says David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Ventures. For this reason, partnering with Amazon, a company that Kaiserman touts as the definitive authority on voice control, commerce, and service, was the most logical choice for attracting consumers.

"Introducing Amazon gives homeowners an almost quintessential experience that’s not actually about technology itself, but about how it fits into their life," he says.

As the wireless technology is integrated into the building plans from the ground up, Kaiserman thinks the process is no different than any other aspect of building a home.

"Builders are engineers at the core. We engineer HVAC systems and plumbing to work and walls to stay up," he says. "So, if we are to respond to consumers' needs appropriately, we should be building homes with wireless in mind. We’re sitting at an incredible time right now, and the opportunity for us as builders is to demonstrate how simple but powerful the modern home can be. Wi-Fi is the beginning of that for us"

The first homes will be for sale in July, with a plan to roll out into all of the company's markets by the end of the year.