They're not widely used today (nor in many people's opinions, useful enough to justify the added cost), but home appliances with Internet connections are available, and more will probably come along in the next few years. Networked connections can allow you to control your household TV, refrigerator, microwave oven, and other appliances through the Internet or from a mobile telephone—even when you're away from home. Combined with built-in diagnostic modules, a network connection will also make it possible to identify problems and notify a service bureau that can either send back a software fix or dispatch a repair person before the problem turns into a catastrophic failure.
Remember the classic science-fiction nightmare in which all your household appliances communicate with one another and conspire to take over your life? When you connect everything to your home network, that fantasy is one step closer to reality.
Several specifications for networked home appliances have been established in order to assure that appliances made by different manufacturers will communicate with one another through a home network, including the Living Network Control Protocol (LnCP), developed by LG Electronics and adopted by several other (mostly Korean) manufacturers, and the Association for Home Appliance Manufacturers' (AHAM) standard for Connected Home Appliances (CHA-1). It's too early to know whether LnCP, CHA-1, or some other specification will ultimately emerge as an industry-wide standard, but it's likely that some method for exchanging data among appliances and other devices through a home network will become common within the next few years.
If you buy a network-compatible "smart" home appliance today, it will probably use an Ethernet port to connect to your home network. Depending on the specific applications built into each appliance, it might use a control panel or remote control unit, dedicated client software, or a web-based interface to run the appliance's communications functions.