The smart home market is important for consumers for many reasons: energy savings, additional security and improved quality of life to name a few. But these benefits do not come for free. In fact, according to a GSMA whitepaper, consumers globally will be spending as much as $121 billion on the smart home market. While security companies and internet search companies have so far led the smart home market charge, it is still a much fractured market because of the myriad of offers and complexity of using all of these services. There is a huge opportunity to "make it simple" and "make it work". This is where service providers can play a vital role. How?
First, service providers enable connectivity to subscribers and homes in form of both landline and wireless services. Often, subscribers buy from service providers because of brand recognition, network reliability trust and data information security trust - all great reasons to buy. But many of the smart home services utilize WiFi exclusively, and while that is great inside the home and around a WiFi hotspot, once you get out of WiFi range, the service is useless. Wireless service providers can take advantage of this brand recognition and trust, and enable seamless connectivity by including 3G, LTE or 5G connectivity to the smart device in addition to the WiFi connectivity.
Additionally, the fractured market of smart home providers means you may have multiple on-ramp voice activation devices from internet companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple in your house, a security system from another company, parental controls from another company, garage door video from another company, and a smart doorbell from yet another company - all of which are getting updated to include AI in some form or another. In other words, it is a complete smorgasbord of smart home devices, none of which work with each other, all of which may not upgrade properly, and all of which work just on WiFi.
Service providers can potentially tie all of these together in the form of an IoT/AI/WiFi/LTE/5G hub that could control all of these functions from a single software application. The software application would not only be able to control different smart devices but also enable them to work seamlessly in either a WiFi or mobile network. In other words, it can provide unique always-on connectivity no matter which network you have at your disposal, and true value. Service providers are really the only ones in a position to offer that kind of seamless connectivity and bridging.
Another key consideration is that while many smart devices are monitoring and monitoring and monitoring away, once there is an "anomaly" it would likely require real-time communication interaction. If something goes wrong, a phone call or video call would be necessary. And who knows how to do real time communication better than service providers?
Dialogic is bridging this gap by providing this "control hub" via our aggregation server software, DialogicOne. We have been providing mission critical real-time communication software for over 35 years via our software media servers and applications. Today, these software cloud-based media servers, applications, and DialogicOne are providing real time communications for many IoT and AI driven services. Our history supports that we know mobile networks very well.
No other company can bridge real-time communications, media, AI and IoT, and integrate them into mobile networks (IMS/4G/LTE/5G) like Dialogic. That is why we are in a unique position to help solve this "control hub" aggregation issue between the integration of new services and the mobile network.
