Home LAN remote management faces customer trust issues

Just as broadband connectivity into the home opened up challenges and opportunities around PC care, connecting TV sets to IP networks in the home will open up challenges and opportunities for service providers as well, one network equipment vendor is advising.

Richard Baker is a senior product manager at Motorola (NYSE: MOT),which bought Netopia, a company known for its Netopia Broadband Server, which provides remote management and service assurance for broadband customer premises equipment (CPE). What Baker sees ahead is the need for a trusted relationship between consumers and the service providers who will help manage their increasingly complex home IP networks. Otherwise, service providers may be caught between the rock of customer expectation for tech support and the hard place of customers’ need for privacy.

“The problem we face in the IP world is the assumption that we own the entire network – we don’t,” Baker said. “There is a whole slew of other user-provided things that the service provider may never know about that can cause collisions on an IP subnet within the home.”

When service providers started offering broadband services, many consumers started expecting them to troubleshoot PC problems as well as broadband problems, a reality that led several service providers to create support services, charging consumers for that extra level of support. Baker believes there will be a need for the same kind of service around home IP networks, including the TV set.

“[Service providers] will have all the problems – how do they discover devices on the network, manage around them and identify when [the consumer] may have a problem,” Baker said. “There are all kinds of issues in the home LAN environment when you deliver services as a carrier, in addition to having end users’ provisioned IP systems.”

The NBS today uses HPNA to discover devices with advanced firmware, find the MAC addresses communicating with the home LAN and identify and resolve conflicts, Baker said. “But there are devices we haven’t even thought of that may not play ball or conform to standards,” he said. “How do we map the home LAN and come through doing a dynamic home LAN map by discovering all the elements and being able to identify them?”

There are multiple options for how to do this, Baker said, but some of them get into privacy issues. For example, the NBS is now supporting Microsoft Mediaroom, the IPTV program, Baker said. It is possible, using remote management, to reset the set-top and even change channels, he said. “That means we know what channel you are watching and potentially what you have recorded on your DVR.”

When companies provide e-care remotely, “We inform the user of what we are doing, and they get to watch, and under those circumstances, according to some heavy-duty surveying we did, they were comfortable letting the techs come in and fix the problem,” Baker said. “It removed them from their terror zone. They let us edit their registry settings because they knew we were doing the right things and we would fix it.”

When service providers start dealing with DVRs, home media stores with family photos and videos, and stored music, “We have to be able to replicate that kind of a comfort and trust level within the environment, so we may have to build additional tools that identify that we are in the home and assisting right now, so the user would know that someone is there,” he said.

With Mediaroom, Motorola is looking to send messages to users’ TV sets to alert them when a set-top box is being reset and give them a countdown timer and the ability to cancel the reset, Baker said. “Normally, this is occurring when we are on the phone call with the customer, getting their cooperative support, much like when someone from the cable or gas company comes in,” Baker said, even when the connection is remotely done. “We have analogous models from the past, but we need to put those in the digital age and not have people thinking their personal media store is being wandered by some technician in Costa Rica who’s bored.”