Connected Homes: The Next Network Frontier

Gateway-makers such as Actiontec and Commtrend are incorporating a variety of different approaches into their home gateway products to maintain flexibility going forward, including multiple home networking protocols — or the option of adding those — along with Wi-Fi, and the three most commonly used in-home data networking protocols: HomePNA, Powerline and multimedia over coax.

It is possible for service providers to use a gateway equipped with DLNA to quickly enable their customers to get a home network connected for digital media sharing, said Andrew Morton, vice president and general manager of the Americas for Comtrend. “I was impressed by how easy it is to auto-discover content,” Morton said. “The customers now trialing this recognize the power of this for them — they can tie in things the customer already owns and potentially put these items in their consumer stores and compete with the Best Buys of the world. It's a way to get operators out of the business of giving everything away to get the service revenue.”

The bottom-line benefit to telecom service providers is that this will be new revenue, Rosenberg said. “They aren't cannibalizing anything the consumer is already buying; it's new dollars,” he said.

Those new dollars are attracting their competitors as well, and any hesitation could mean lost market share, Rosenberg cautioned. In his report on the “green opportunity” issued in the summer of 2008, Rosenberg estimated an 18-month window of getting into remote energy management before energy companies have seized on that opportunity themselves.