The SmartHome 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.   And while security companies and internet search companies have so far led the SmartHome market charge, it is still a very 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”.  And this is where service providers can in fact play a vital role.  How?

First, service providers enable connectivity to subscribers and homes in the form of both landline and wireless services.  And these subscribers buy from a service provider because of brand recognition, network reliability trust, and data information security trust.  All great reasons to buy. 

But many of the SmartHome 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 SmartDevice in addition to the WiFi connectivity.