There is an air of anticipation; that the Connected Home Over IP (CHIP) Project is about to release something juicy for the smart home – something that the operator crowd is going to sink its teeth into.
Wireless Watch’s sister service, Faultline, which provides weekly analysis of digital video issues, has spotted a handful of breadcrumbs that hint at the shape of the CHIP project’s efforts. In isolation, these crumbs are not particularly noteworthy, but they add up to something that deserves examining – a wireless stack that would join together multiple different wireless protocols within a home, allowing messages to be carried between devices regardless of their OEM, and which would add a value greater than the sum of their parts to the in-home customer experience.
To address the sceptics; you are quite right, we have heard similar proclamations before, CHIP hasn’t yet made much visible progress, and the smart home hype machine has been greatly diminished in the past year.
However, here are some rather important names that should be considered. Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, Huawei, STMicro, TI, Tuya, and Silicon Labs are all major CHIP members. While promoter members include ADT, Arris, CableLabs, Card Access Eng, Charter, Control4, Deutsche Telekom, LG, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Sagemcom, Samsung, TCL, Universal Electronics, and Vivint.
Combined, that is an immense amount of industry influence. From the set-top and TV perspective, Comcast’s X1, CableLabs’ RDK, and Google’s Android TV cover the major bases – with Arris (now CommScope) and TV makers like LG, Samsung, and TCL present too. At the silicon level, most of the big players are involved too. The presence of Qualcomm and MediaTek are also important on the smartphone front.
Because televisions are important focal points in the home, they need to be at the heart of a compelling smart home experience. The move from audio-based smart home speakers to ones that now prominently house displays is proof that a screen is an important feature. Televisions are the largest and best screens in the home, usually, and so being able to bridge the gap between smart home platforms and the in-home equipment is pivotal.
To that end, video service providers have to be involved. As it stands, this directly involves the set-tops, but in time, as those die out, it will come to rely on the connected televisions in these homes. Of course, in the background, the home gateways that provide WiFi access lurk, and those are arguably the most important devices in this equation. Without a network, we cannot have smart homes.
This outlook is informed by the recent switch observed in major operators. They are broadband providers, first and foremost, with a sideline in pay-TV services distributed via dedicated video networks. It seems obvious that these pay-TV services should be migrated to broadband delivery as soon as possible, but this hastens the demise of the video-related CPE – leaving just the mission-critical WiFi infrastructure in place.
The home gateways need to be capable of handling all the internal home traffic, which will increasingly consist of video traffic from security cameras – one of the most appealing use cases for smart home buyers. To support that growth in traffic, the upload speeds from the customer homes needs to be prioritized, and as more devices in a home are gradually connected to the internet, customers are going to find WiFi quality to be a much bigger purchasing and churn decision.
To this end, we have seen operators begin charging what are effectively subscriptions for value-add WiFi services. Plume is powering Comcast’s XFi services, which start at $14 a month for managed WiFi and parental controls, and it seems to have over 66% penetration among Comcast broadband subscribers. Most stakeholders would have thought such a service impossible, or exceedingly difficult, had you asked them about its viability a decade ago. It is not hard to see how the same shift will occur in the smart home.
A recent blog post from the Thread Group outlined a new set of capabilities for Thread – a low power personal area network protocol that uses the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer to form a mesh. Thread was always a bit weird, because it lacked an application layer and had to rely on Zigbee for that. Zigbee was always a bit lacking, because it didn’t have native IP addressability. But together, Zigbee and Thread formed a rather capable symbiotic proposition.
But this quiet announcement teased capabilities that are new. It was penned by Nathan Dyck, CPO of smart home device maker Nanoleaf – one that is exceptionally close to the Apple HomeKit stack. This is important, because Apple has pursued a path of offloading the burden of hosting cloud infrastructure from the device makers and housing it inside Apple’s ecosystem. Privacy and data protection has been the primary justification for this, but the consumer experience of requiring multiple radio hubs in a home was decidedly un-Apple.
However, Apple seems to have been on the right path. There were once a number of different smart home hubs, but nearly all of them have died off. This is mostly due to the rise of the Amazon and Google platforms, centered around their voice-assisted speakers, which can act as hubs for some devices. In these devices, the cloud-based platforms are the effective operating systems that link devices together, rather than a local software stack on an in-home device that is translating those commands.
But we have seen what happens when there are cloud outages. A smart home is, at best, irksome when there is an Internet outage, but there are scenarios today when they can be dangerous. Moving forward, if more and more devices are connected, suddenly the risk of a platform outage gets increasingly risky. To that end, the broadband provider is also exposed, if the connection goes down.
As such, running the applications locally is the only sure-fire way to ensure that a user isn’t locked in or out of their home, that their cooking or HVAC system doesn’t become dangerous if it can’t be reached, or a connected bath or sink doesn’t overflow if the internet connection goes down. Consequently, the CPE from the broadband provider is critically important.
This is why the Shared Mesh proposition is so interesting, where the CPE can act as the border routers. What is being described here is the form that CHIP’s standard will take, and given the interest of the operators and vendors that support them, it looks like these concepts are going to shortly appear within a technology stack that will open the door for value-add services and stickier customer offerings.
As well as Nanoleaf, Eve has recently announced that it will be adding Thread to its lineup. Eve has worked exclusively with Apple, due to the aforementioned HomeKit cloud architecture. Thread appears to finally be getting some momentum, and its governing body’s ties to CHIP mean that we can put more faith in its direction. CHIP houses all the smart home heavyweights, as well as some of the most influential operators and associated vendors in the market. To write it off seems foolish, but don’t get your hopes up for an immediate turnaround.