Smart Home Needs to Be Like Utility, but Getting There a Challenge, Say Executives

Making internet services as ubiquitous in the future as household utilities are today was a pervasive theme among speakers at Silicon Labs’ virtual Works With developer event Wednesday and Thursday. “Our services should melt into the background, becoming as reliable and essential as running water or electricity,” said Grant Erickson, Google principal software engineer.

A lot of challenges must be met to reach the $150 billion valuation Google sees for IoT by 2023, Erickson said, citing “fragmented silos” that are costly for manufacturers and confusing for consumers. Manufacturers incur unnecessarily high product development costs because they have to support multiple, “lightly differentiated and fundamentally non-interoperable stock keeping units,” he said. Consumers don’t know what works together and how their privacy and security are protected, he said, and that's creating a ceiling for consumer IoT that's "reducing the rate of adoption and growth in the space.”

Google put its weight behind Project Connected Home Over IP (see 1912180053), a smart home working group spearheaded by the Zigbee Alliance with some 145 member companies as of last week, said Erickson. He called CHIP a “critical movement to break through the fragmentation that’s holding the market back.” The goal of CHIP is to create IP-based, interoperable standards that “people can rely on” and deploy and that allow for consumer choice, growth, differentiation and “builder confidence,” he said.

In Google’s vision of the future of IoT, based on ambient computing, “we won’t talk about connected,” said Erickson. At home, “we’re not going to talk anymore about smart devices or connected devices: We’re just going to talk about lights, locks and thermostats." Consumers will expect connected experiences to just work, "and we’re not going to think about the days before smart and after smart. It is just going to be the de facto ways things are.” Devices will “orchestrate themselves” to solve problems for users automatically, he said.

Comcast, too, has invested heavily in CHIP, said Jim Kitchen, vice president-product in its connected home devices and platforms unit. He touted CHIP for being “code-first," saying it's both a standard and an open-source project. CHIP has hundreds of developers today, “hopefully expanding out to thousands." That the CHIP code will be available to developers as a starting point will drive ubiquity and interoperability that hasn’t existed before, Kitchen said, describing CHIP as a set of standards, protocols and communications technologies that will “clear the decks and hopefully make things much simpler from an end user’s perspective.”

Though the IoT has gotten better with advances in technology, it’s still confusing for end users, Kitchen said. He cited a “boundary” for consumers shopping in store or online to "confidently purchase a device that they know is going to work with the rest of the things that are in their home or with whatever platform they’ve decided to invest in.” Interoperability is the biggest challenge for the IoT, he said: “I don’t know if getting to the next level of interoperability is going to be the thing that finally lets these products get into 300 million homes in North America, but I know that has to happen before we get into 300 million homes.”

On what success in the IoT space looks like in five years, Kitchen said, “Things just work. You don’t have to think about it anymore.” He gave the example of buying a TV: “It’s a really simple choice,” broken out into good, better, best decisions and features such as resolution and smart technology. “Those are pretty simple, easy-to-understand choices for people to make. We need to get there.”

That means eliminating chances for consumers to get lost or confused, Kitchen said, referencing the complicated process today for purchase, activation, provisioning, setup and interaction with IoT devices: “All that needs to be simplified.” He wants a standardized minimum set of expectations consumers should have on privacy and security of their data, which today is “all over the board.” CHIP members “all care about this deeply: Nobody wants to be the next press release” for a privacy or security issue, he said. “Putting them in control of that information is going to be a huge thing for the industry to solve as well.”