Cisco once sought to control the home media network with an end-to-end approach, even providing the IP end points such as set-top boxes, tablets and camcorders. It pulled back from that strategy as part of last year’s reorganization, but it still has its eyes on a more influential role in the connected home than just supplying commoditized routers and gateways. Instead, it will be pushing intelligence and apps to those products, hooking them into a cloud-based platform which Cisco will use to stand out from the home network crowd.
In April, Cisco unveiled a trio of intelligent Wi-Fi routers, which can run third party applications and link to cloud services. Now the software platform which sets them apart from other routers, Cisco Connect Cloud, has gone live, enabling users to manage all their wireless home devices remotely.
Cisco says its approach will change the way users interact with their connected entertainment products and home appliances, which can now all be monitored and managed via the internet and the EA series of routers. These products ‘ the Linksys EA2700, EA3500, and EA4500 ‘ extend the trend for intelligence and applications to be added to every kind of device, from base stations to sensors, via cloud services.
The home router market is certainly not standing still, as users start to create multiscreen digital networks allowing them to view video and access data from many devices round the house. This will enhance the role and value of routers as they become the control center for these multimedia systems, incorporating new technologies like HD quality Wi-Fi. Linksys’s router R&D has been heavily focused on products which can detect all the connected devices in the home and their capabilities, in order to decide on the highest quality routes for different types of content. The next step is to expand their role further, making them the main intersection between the home WLan and the service provider network. The Linksys box aims to become the common point for every gadget in the house to connect to the outside world, rather than the current situation where each gateway, internet TV and home control box has its own internet link.
Initially the three EA routers made their debut only with a local network mobile app, Cisco Connect Express, but now the web-based version is available, and usable via a smartphone application or a web portal. And, for the first time, Cisco is permitting third party developers to create mobile apps for the routers too. Six items of iOS software are already available for the EA Series, including Twonky Video, which allows users to browse video content on the home network from a phone or tablet, and beam it to any DLNA or AirPlay device. Another is IP Camera Viewer, which can view and manage any IP camera connected to an EA router, from a mobile gadget.
To extend the apps base, Cisco has also set up the Linksys Developer Community, which provides software developer kits, tutorials and sample code to stimulate the creation of new software. There is also a more official partner program, mainly for vendors of home appliances and entertainment systems, with Whirlpool and Onkyo among the first sign-ups.
New EA routers will have support for Connect Cloud built-in, while existing ones can receive it as an automatic update. The new firmware adds other new features too, such as a more robust web interface, and SimpleTap, which allows devices to be connected using NFC tapping.
This line of products will add value (and margin) to the commoditized home router, but their real importance is to spearhead Cisco’s broader push to establish a home management ecosystem, which will see its cloud software being used to control and integrate a vast range of connected products.
This fits with its new vision for its Linksys division, which survived last year’s cull of some Cisco businesses, despite rumors to the contrary, and has even kept its own brand. However, Cisco said last fall that the division would stop making client devices and would focus entirely on the network itself, in line with the pared-down strategy of its parent in the enterprise and carrier worlds. Brett Wingo, general manager of Linksys, said in an interview at the time that it would stop focusing on gadgets which attach to the network and place its resources into its gateways and routers. Routers are “sitting idle and not doing things a lot of the time, and you can have them do more and you can run more services on them,” he added. ‘The hardware that’s capable of moving video around the house or displaying software onto a screen … those types of things can be done in the router in a lot of cases.”
This is a mirror image of the well established Cisco strategy for the enterprise and, more recently, the carrier, where a huge range of functionality is loaded onto the router rather than taking place on dedicated appliances or on the server. While many of the domestic versions of these super-routers will be managed by carriers, Cisco does envisage them becoming sufficiently simple in terms of set-up, user interface and control to be acquired at retail by consumers. As well as making Linksys more indispensable to customers by expanding its role in the home network, the strategy should also boost the perceived value, and therefore the price and margin, of boxes which are increasingly commoditized and selected on price alone.
And the router will morph further to adapt to the new shapes of the IP network, and the new gadgets it will connect. Last summer, Cisco unveiled a tiny, ‘go anywhere’ router designed for machine-to-machine networks, and will aim to provide the intelligence and cloud services to push that out of the commodity realm too.
The miniature, ruggedized Integrated Services Router 819 M2M Gateway is the smallest member of the ISR family of branch and remote office routers, but toughened up to cope with the outdoors and with extreme temperatures. It relies mainly on cellular connections to reach the internet, and so can be installed in moving vehicles. It has space for two SIM cards so that it can be linked to two operators, for redundancy, and can use GSM, CDMA or W-CDMA. LTE connectivity may be added from next year, although most M2M applications require only low end wireless speeds. Target markets include transport management, meter reading, ATMs and trucks.
‘ Cisco also announced the Linksys EA6500, its first router supporting the emerging gigabit Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac. This supports 3×3 MIMO and promises simultaneous rates of up to 1.3Gbps in 5GHz and 450MHz in 2.4GHz.