AT&T seems to be changing tack in the home automation part of the IoT market, and will open up its Digital Life product to a whole new raft of devices. This either means that its own Xanboo software specialist will have to beef up to write all of these devices into its software systems, or it will have to open up a program for software from outside of Xanboo.
After buying a ready-made bunch of home automation products in 2010, AT&T took almost 2 years to turn the Xanboo products into a service offering, and already it looks like that is no longer a broad enough offering. It may keep all the programming with Xanboo, but it plans to open up communication for many new types of device, the company says.
It doesn’t help that the entire US market for IoT is on shifting sand, succumbing to the low power international ZigBee standard, rather than sticking purely with the US grown Z-Wave low power home and industrial automation standard. AT&T will have barely updated its own Cisco built home hub with ZigBee, by the time it will also need to embrace low power Bluetooth as well.
In fact the Cisco hub that AT&T ships now already has five radios in it, which must push the cost up fairly radically. This includes a Z-Wave radio and WiFi used to control and manage appliances, lighting, and HVAC; remotely lock or unlock doors; and detect water leaks. Another radio is GSM and links back to the AT&T mobile network. The box can also plug into HomePlug Av to push video frames out into the internet for security applications.
It was only last month that US telco rival Verizon came back to the home automation fold having pulled out of the market in February, having made the same ‘Z-wave only’ decision in its home hubs, that came from Arris (from its Motorola acquisition, which had previously bought 4Home). The Z-Wave radios had to be augmented with ZigBee, due to the amount of devices and actuators on the market which are going down the ZigBee route for communications.
The home automation part of the IoT market is immature and companies like Qualcomm with its AllJoyn initiative and Broadcom with its Blue-tooth oriented Wiced architecture have yet to make their impact, but are almost bound to end up dominating the technology, cause strategy changes at operators like AT&T and Verizon for some time to come.
So if AT&T now opens up Digital Life it may find itself irresistibly drawn into these emerging eco-systems simultaneously to enable even more devices.
The story broke in Fierce Wireless this week, with AT&T openly admitting that the move is coming, but without filling in any of the finer points of detail.
So far AT&T has a solid security offering involving video feeds of various rooms going to a smartphone, an energy package that controls lighting and thermostats, and one that opens doors and windows, as well as another that detects water leaks.
It has already added pet monitoring and will now look to open up potential health apps, such as monitoring of the elderly and has just held an Innovation Showcase in New York where it said it would begin testing new appliances and applications.
One idea put forward is a sleep-monitoring wearable device which turns house lights off when you fall asleep, another discussed was somehow tracking prescription drugs and dosage, an idea that a number of companies are known to be working on. Wearable health monitors are also being considered to track heart rate and other vital signs. AT&T has so far only rolled out Digital Life into 81 markets in the US.