Smart home tech trends to become S$11b opportunity for telcos in 2022: ABI Research

Communication service providers such as AT&T, Comcast, Orange, and Verizon are actively advancing the growth of smart home adoption by building connecte home offerings alongside their investments and deployments of broadband and video services.

However, more recently most telcos have been outperformed by aggressive competition and are now at a crucial stage: they must either accelerate their UnTelco strategies – activities they should pursue beyond their traditional offerings to foster revenue growth – in smart homes to take back the ownership of the home or risk being relegated as marginal players.

Some key facts:

The impact of artificial intelligence on regional telecommunications, higher education and the urban environment will be the focus of a new research group launched today as part of a new five-year alliance between Optus Business and Curtin University.

The five-year alliance will develop an AI research group and will combine key synergies between Curtin’s excellent research, teaching and learning capabilities, and the Optus’ market-leading technology and infrastructure capabilities.

An Optus Chair in Artificial Intelligence and three Optus Research Fellows will be appointed to focus on applying artificial intelligence technologies in areas such as regional telecommunications, improving higher education student outcomes and the urban environment, as well as funding for PhD scholarships and student projects.

“CSPs are being threatened in a market increasingly driven by the likes of Google and Amazon with a range of products and services from AI-powered smart home voice control smart speakers to security solutions,” said Abi Research senior analyst Pablo Tomasi. “But things are changing and CSPs are accelerating their strategies for the smart home. Telefonica with Aura, Orange with Djingo, and SK Telecom with Nugu lead the way of CSPs developing AI assistants to support their smart home play.”

“Now is the time for CSPs to be more aggressive in tying the usage of their AI assistants to their other connected and smart home offerings,” he added.

ABI  noted that CSPs have assets all around the connected home from providing connectivity, creating content and delivering video, to specific applications such as monitored security and as such, they have a wider reach than any other competitor.

“CSPs should use this mix of essential – e.g., broadband connectivity – and value-added services  such as monitored security to tailor a strategy fine-tuned to customers’ needs and regional dynamics. “CSPs should not impose their legacy fixed-line business model to the smart home,” he said, admiringated.

“The smart home is core to CSPs’ future and it is a real test to assess how far CSPs have developed their business beyond their telco heritage and how they can adapt their bundling business to market condition, experiment with innovation, and compete head-to-head with webscale players,”  concluded Cave.

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