Having first launched its smart home offering in Norway in 2017, Deutsche Telekom has announced a distribution deal with a group of 15 energy companies to bring its Qivicon platform to market – through a new company called Hitch. Over in the US, the other major player in the Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) game, Comcast, has announced a partnership with a startup called Hippo, to explore using smart home devices to provide data for insurers to use in their pricing – a term known as Usage-based Insurance (UBI). This whole market has been very slow to emerge, despite its clear value to the operators – who can use SHaaS to tie customers into contracts, and enjoy greatly reduced…