And this got me thinking about small carriers offering IoT as a product. Big companies like Comcast are now offering a home automation package. Comcast has integrated nine different devices together that range from security, smart locks, smart lights, smart thermostat, etc. Comcast reports that they are surpassing their early goals and have a penetration rate of over 5% of total broadband customers.
But I would think that a company as large as Comcast has developed their own proprietary IoT hub to work seamlessly with all of the various devices. But finding a reliable hub vendor, and working to get any hub to work with a core set of devices can be a daunting task for smaller carriers. And since there are not yet any industry standards for IoT, devices don’t automatically integrate into different brands of hubs and will not work at all in many cases.
The real fear for a small carrier is that you’d build a product line around some specific brand of hub and that hub would either be discontinued or the company that makes it might even disappear. If you can’t trust somebody as large as Google for an IoT hub, then who can you trust in an industry that doesn’t yet have any clear dominant IoT manufacturers?
There are other issues with the IoT business plan that have to be considered. Probably the most immediate and costly issue is the fact that supporting residential IoT means a lot of truck rolls. I’ve looked at the cost of a truck roll for some of my clients and it’s not unusual to see costs of $50 to $75 for a truck roll, and so any business plan has to compensate for a product that is going to require multiple visits to customers over time.
Another issue to consider is customer expectations. There is now a huge variety of smart devices on the market and the vast majority of them are not going to work with whatever hub you choose. I would expect that once customers have some IoT devices from an ISP that they are going to buy other devices and will be disappointed when they won’t work with the hub that they are already paying for. And it’s virtually impossible for a small ISP to integrate incompatible devices with their hub of choice.
Yet another issue that is still of concern for the whole industry is security. Smart devices tend to have very rudimentary operating software and IT experts say that hacking IoT networks is relatively easy. I don’t think many of us are too worried about somebody hacking into our smart coffee pot, but when you put your thermostat, front door locks and watering systems onto a network together there is a lot of chance for damage from malicious hacking.
But a greater security concern is that an IoT network can be a gateway to your entire network and can let in malware and other problems that can create havoc with finances and personal data stored on your computers.
There are certainly customers that will buy these services, as has been demonstrated by Comcast. We might be decades away from a time where there might be significant penetration rates like we see with triple play products. But there probably is an opportunity today to get a small, but potentially profitable product out into the market. But the risks and costs of offering residential IoT still looks to be out of the comfort zone of many small ISPs. Perhaps rather than try to offer a full suite of products like Comcast is doing, a more workable strategy might be to concentrate on a small handful of functions like security and smart thermostats.