New Research Outlines Coming Battles in Connected Home

Because of its consumer-facing prominence, the connected home market is arguably the most important sector of the IoT industry, at least for the present. New research from analysis firm Delta-ee indicates that there are four battles facing the future of the market.

Those four battles will be: determining what will become the primary reference radio and communication protocol; resolve the many different ways to make devices interact with each other in absence of true interoperability; how to create a fixed in-home device which will replace the cloud in absence of Internet in the house; and making itself the center of the house by providing an IoT platform.

The report said that Wi-Fi is in a strong position to win in terms of connected home communication protocol, but it’s also got some problems. It is backed up by a strong mobile industry, complete with billions of already ready devices, while the upcoming connected home radios have yet to demonstrate they can reach the needed scale. In the meantime, Wi-Fi is much cheaper than any of its competitors, and more versatile, if not as secure. Devices used for Wi-Fi also don't require a gateway to connect to the cloud, which is another advantage as this extra white box can be costly, hardly upgradable and seen as unnecessary in the eyes of the customer.

“Platforms with gateways such as Google/Nest or Samsung/Smart Things will need to justify the cost of this extra device,” said Arthur Jouannic, Senior Analyst, Delta-ee. “It will have to be able to run all the connected devices of the house at times when the Internet connection is lost, to store information, download and process apps.”

In terms of the other predicted challenges, no clear leader seems to be emerging yet, but they will need to be found. Open platforms and better communication between devices will be required to fully develop the Internet of Things, not just in the connected home markets.

“Customers will buy devices from different manufacturers and will expect them to work with each other. If some platforms like Google and Apple are likely to remain top-end walled-garden approaches, interesting developments have been made recently with Allseen and Open-Interconnect,” said Jounnic. “We expect that both approaches will have a role but in different parts of the market.”

This research comes from Delta-ee's Connected Home Service and the ‘Infrastructure’ report, available here.