For Service Providers, it’s Time to Stake a Claim in the Connected Home

A new white paper from Parks Associates makes the case that service providers are in a strong position to stake a claim in the connected home in 2018 and beyond.

As the white paper notes, the majority of U.S. consumers—61 percent of them as of Q3 2017—continue to rely on their service providers to supply their home networking solutions. 

With this firm foothold in the connected home, service providers are in an enviable position—one where competitive providers of connected home solutions would love to be.

There’s no question the stakes are high. If service providers succeed, as the white paper notes, they will “control the data, capture share of mind, and provide a foundation for long-term revenue growth and share of wallet for years to come.”

That’s a compelling vision, but success is by no means guaranteed, especially as consumer-grade solutions continue to vie for their share of the connected home with a range of innovative new features and devices.

In this first in a series of four blogs, I’ll take a quick look at three recommendations from the white paper intended to guide service providers as they attempt to solidify and expand on their position in the connected home market:

1. Don’t wait for greater connected device penetration

Some service providers have been waiting for greater penetration of connected devices before taking steps to provide consumers with hardware that’s optimized to support them. The time for waiting is over. Service providers need to act now to proactively “solve the problem of fragmented networking methods by supporting virtually any device a consumer may choose.”

2. Boost consumer confidence with better data security

Data security continues to be a major source of anxiety among broadband subscribers, with 76 percent of American broadband households expressing high levels of concern about these issues, especially as they consider introducing additional Wi-Fi-enabled devices into their homes. Service providers have an opportunity to address these concerns by embedding better security capabilities into their solutions that monitor "both incoming traffic and the behavior of edge devices that might be infected with malware or compromised in a botnet attack."

3. Focus on premium Wi-Fi performance

For all the advances in Wi-Fi solutions over the last decade, consumers continue to experience challenges setting up and using their home networks. For service providers, this represents another important area of focus, which entails providing consumers with enhanced, feature-rich premises devices that offer better performance and are simple to set up. It also entails providing ongoing support to consumers; so they have somewhere to turn when problems do arise.

Get your copy of the white paper today!

To learn more about these and other findings in more detail, download your copy of the “Staking a Claim in the Connected Home” white paper.

And stay tuned for the other posts in this series.