Nokia aims to simplify smart home with IoT hub launch

Nokia has announced the launch of a white-label IoT solution to coordinate the smart home, as well as a network-level IoT management platform.

The Nokia Smart Home solution will be distributed via operator channels to help telcos bundle together consumer-facing IoT offerings and offer a domestic hub for all connected things in the smart home. Included in the bundle is a hub which acts as an optical network terminal and gateway for residents; as well as two mobile applications and IoT management platforms to help users control the home and the devices therein.

Nokia says the solution will allow operators to not only manage the plethora of devices destined to flood the market before 2020 – this time the forecasted number is somewhere between 20 and 46 billion – but also to capture a chunk of the growing smart home market, which it also forecasts to grow to $39 billion in the next three and a half years.

The smart home hub itself apparently unifies and simplifies the smart home, before it becomes a cumbersome mess of segregated appliances and applications. This simplified approach looks to have been reflected in the hub’s name, the snappily titled “7368 ISAM ONT G240 WZ-A”.

“With the rapid growth of IoT and increasing number of smart devices in the home, residential customers are seeking a single solution that is simple to install and easy to manage,” said Federico Guillén, Nokia’s Fixed Networks President. “In a very fragmented market, network operators have a unique opportunity to stand out from other OTT players and position themselves as the smart home providers of the future. The Nokia Smart Home solution offers operators the chance to get ahead of the IoT trend and provide customers with a simple plug-and-play solution that is fully interoperable with the leading Wi-Fi technologies and standards needed to manage smart devices and applications. It will also help operators provide new smart home security and automation services that can generate additional revenue opportunities and further enhance customer loyalty.”

ABI Research says there’s a need to have one unifying platform because multiple protocols, including wifi, Z-Wave and ZigBee, are likely to dominate smart home and conflicts may occur with interoperability. It claims the three aforementioned protocols already control roughly 66% of smart devices shipped so far in 2016.

“The broad Smart Home market is still fairly young,” said Jonathon Collins, Research Director for Smart Home at ABI Research. “As a leading IoT segment there is clear potential for rapid growth and with that new revenue opportunities for network operators.  However, critical to growth will be providing interoperability between myriad devices. Increasingly operators must ensure that the residential smart home device they deploy can support multiple protocols in a single device, including Wi-Fi, ZigBee and Z-Wave.”

Meanwhile, in other Nokia IoT news, the Finnish vendor also announced the launch of an operator, enterprise and government-ready platform for scaling IoT services. It claims the IMPACT platform handles data collection and analysis of events on the network, while also securely capturing device activity and claiming the ability to launch applications on any device, using any protocol and across any application.

Alongside the launch of IMPACT, Nokia has also launched the Motive Connected Device Platform, which it claims can support the management of more than 80,000 models of broadband, home and IoT devices in a converged platform integrating all Nokia mobile and IoT device management software.

“Our new IMPACT platform with Motive CDP is particularly strong in device management, security and analytics,” said Bhaskar Gorti, Nokia’s President of Applications and Analytics Business Group. “These matter because as we work to collect and derive meaning from IoT data, it becomes more valuable to everyone involved – and more crucial to protect.”

Learn more about the latest developments in consumer IoT atSmart Home World 2016,taking place on 21st & 22nd June at The Crystal, London. Click here to find out more.