Connected Homes: The Next Network Frontier

Verizon announced this summer that it will use home gateways from Actiontec and Westell to upgrade the in-home network to 175 Mb/s within the home. The gateways will enable multiple in-home Wi-Fi networks with differing levels of security, as well as offer media sharing among home devices such as TVs, PCs, media servers and other consumer electronics using the DLNA and Universal Plug and Play standards.

Verizon will be able to leverage its gateways to enable services such as home monitoring and more, Saxena said, but hasn't yet decided to do that. “From a technical perspective, we've already taken a direction that, hopefully, we would be able to leverage these things when they become easy for consumers to do,” he said. “One of the gaps has been that these industry ecosystems for media sharing and home monitoring always assume somehow that the ecosystem begins and ends inside the home — that there is no outside manager coming in to manage that ecosystem. Operators have become more active in trying to propose an extension to these technologies to allow an operator to manage.”

Within the DLNA, that gap is being filled by extending an operator profile, Saxena said. Such a profile already exists for streaming media, making Web cams inside the home something that can be done more easily today, he said.

AT&T already offers a service that allows remote security cameras to be viewed over the Internet or via a customer's mobile phone, said Dave Wolter, executive director of radio technology. “We are actively examining both the technologies and the applications to extend the value of communications and networking in the home,” Wolter wrote in an e-mail. “The method of connection for each of these devices and applications may vary based on cost-effectiveness and performance considerations. Some of these connections will be wired and some will be wireless.”

One stumbling block that Wolter sees is a lack of quality of service mechanisms on existing home networking options, “to ensure that each service type operates and interacts properly. Interworking various standards and providing common control, maintenance and remote access for provisioning and management can also be significant issues in networks with disparate types and protocols.”

Wolter believes it's too early to tell which technologies might come into play — Powerline, Zigbee, Z-Wave or others. “The key is to knit it into an integrated home network and integrate that home network into the broadband network and Internet in a reliable and secure manner,” he said. “That's the core direction AT&T is pursuing.”