Delivering The Connected Home

The consumer demand for remote-enabled convenience, or “the connected home”, is also being expanded by the needs of medical professionals. As population and life expectancy increases, health care providers are looking for new ways to monitor their patients’ vital statistics and exercise routines, and issue prescription refills without the need for lengthy office visits. Wireless medical devices are assisting them in doing this. Remote medical services is an industry that expects heavy growth in 2014, and a new report from Research and Markets suggests that the mobile healthcare marketplace is expected to reach $26 billion by 2017.

But how do these trends impact a service network? And what should providers do to make sure they’re ready for it?

The demand for more IP-connected devices means that service networks are going to become increasingly complicated. Providers need to gain a holistic view of their networks, without having to search through various data portals. By consolidating separate silos into one centralized database, operators gain access to information that helps monitor networks for service requirements, bandwidth consumption, and security.

In order to keep customer QoE high, providers need visibility into home networks, and the ability to manage the activation and delivery performance to each connected device, even over WiFi. If done correctly, a provider will boost their customer satisfaction and increase subscriber loyalty with faster provisioning, insightful customer service, and effective CPE management.

Globally, the home automation and control system market is estimated to reach 16.4 billion USD by 2019. The market is clearly worthy of our time. The industry must focus on developing intelligent tools that can analyze bandwidth, streamline service provisioning, and provide proactive solutions to subscriber issues; effectively delivering “the connected home”.