2021.01.28 – Standards essential to help the smart home get smarter (before it has a nervous breakdown)

Standards essential to help the smart home get smarter (before it has a nervous breakdown)

Telecom TV – 2021.01.28

‘The Broadband Forum claims that it’s doing a good job of impressing on the world’s broadband service providers how important its standard services platform will prove to be as broadband service deployment to the home continues to accelerate it. It claims that more than three out of four broadband service providers have either started to implement the Broadband Forum’s User Services Platform (USP) or plan to do so in the next year, according to the forum’s new report.

Stuffing the home with devices

Users are still buying smart home devices at an alarming rate (a further rise of 75 percent is projected by 2025) and more and smarter devices means more potential complexity for the home network and whoever is tasked with keeping it running smoothly.

The report highlights the problem of fragmentation in home CPE and middleware as the biggest barriers to home network growth. That’s because the inevitable response to specific problems is that small innovative firms tend to invent improvements to thinks like Wi-Fi mesh schemes. Of course one-off improvements lead to chronic interoperability problems up the track as new home technologies pile in.

“As the demand for connected home services continues to proliferate, service providers are playing less of a central role in the consumers’ smart homes and have instead decided to partner or concentrate on enabling third parties to play their role within a managed service offering,” according to the forum’s Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Business Development, Craig Thomas. “This has led to fragmentation which industry wide standards play a pivotal role in combating.” Whether the Broadband Forum does effective outreach to try to influence new product developers towards it’s standards ‘before’ they become network unicorns is harder to say.’

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