As the home becomes a local area network supporting everything from video surveillance to energy management and from communications and Internet services to smart appliances and health care applications, telecom network operators such as Verizon Communications are well positioned to step in and manage it all. But do they want to?
The answer is yes, but don’t get any ideas about Verizon breeding a brigade of Super Geeks to run around supporting the effort. For Verizon, the home is the network and network technology is the geek squad. Building the right technology into the customer premises equipment upfront can avoid a lot of problems later on, said Tushar Saxena, director of home networking technologies at Verizon.
We’ll see how he plans to do that, but first, a FiOS status update. The fiber optic-based bundled communications service from Verizon known as FiOS now is available in 16 states and has 3.1 million Internet users and 2.5 million TV viewers. Both services picked up 300,000 customers last quarter which was a 62 to 70 percent improvement over the same quarter last year. By next year, the company says it will have 50 percent of the homes that are passed by fiber served with GPON technology. Today, it is more than 40 percent. That fiber network now passes 13.8 million homes and businesses.
And on August 19th, the company introduced FiOS TV and cell phone integration. Over the next three months, Verizon will release a program that will allow cell phones to act like a remote control.
Telecom is not the only brand of service provider that wants to exploit the home network. Security, smart grid and health care services all want in. But because the delivery and support paradigms are still uncertain for some of these, particularly the smart grid, any company that plans to either manage or support an environment in which others can manage these services needs to be developing the capability now.
Verizon’s strategy is to ensure that FiOS has the connectivity and the platforms necessary for service enablement in the home. But Saxena doesn’t want to burden the customer or the technician with implementing it. To that end, all devices within the home network are cross-connected and soon will be preconfigured with connectivity, service management, diagnostics and even third-party applications.
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