By Aqara

The complexity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and high expectations for smart home deployments pose technology challenges that Aqara, a global leader in smart home solutions, has embraced for more than a decade. The company has undertaken key initiatives to increase interoperability across IoT devices and promote global smart home adoptions. Strategic partnerships between carriers and smart-home vendors like Aqara are critical to bringing the connected home experience to more households worldwide.

Along with new wireless innovations, telecoms offer critical infrastructural support for smart home environments and for increased adoptions. In turn, telcos gain opportunities to add new revenue streams through value-added services, grow their customer bases and ensure customer stickiness through offering smart home services with higher quality, competitive pricing and convenience. In this article, we look at how Aqara and the South Korean telecom LG U+ (LG Uplus) are collaborating to offer end-to-end smart home solutions that contain smart devices, software, and cloud services. We also consider the role that Aqara plays in offering cutting-edge IoT and smart home technology to global users.

Smart Home Adoption Spurred by a Unifying Standard

The inability of different smart devices to communicate with one another has represented a key obstacle to widespread deployment of smart homes. That’s why the entire industry – including over 280 companies featuring recognized names such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung – has come together to launch Matter, a new IoT standard that connects the currently fragmented landscape.

Matter represents a new connectivity protocol that guarantees interoperability between different branded devices. The recognized standard makes it easier for end users to set up smart homes more quickly while supporting different platforms and systems.

Matter also provides consistent, open-source attestation for safe interconnectivity. Matter-based devices encrypt all data throughputs whether in transit or at rest and manufacturers can build security into devices through unique certifications that demonstrate compliance. The protocol not only verifies connections, but also authenticates a device to further protect and streamline communications.

Featuring simplicity, interoperability and security, the Matter standard represents the industry’s hope to usher in a new era of massive smart home adoptions around the world.

Smart Home Deployments: Win-Win Opportunities for Carriers

The smart home market, and IoT-enabled services in general, offer untapped potential for telecoms. In addition to smart home and smart city services, the private and commercial use cases are nearly limitless. For example, nascent opportunities exist for convergent products that combine big data, AI and IoT services in the B2B market. These include everything from utility telemetering and IoT-enabled municipal services to increased robotic manufacturing. Recently, South Korean telecom LG U+ collaborated with Aqara to offer a co-branded smart home solution as a premier value-added service.

The My Home Guard security solution ensures 24/7 home protection and monitoring via indoor cameras and smart sensors. With a monthly subscription, homeowners stay in-the-know,  receive push notifications to their smartphones when suspicious activity is detected, and have instant access to local police with the push of a button. Should the worst happen, home accident insurance is also included in the package.

Aqara’s expertise and experience in smart home combined with the consumer and business reach of LG U+ represents a notable step forward for industry and carrier partnerships around smart initiatives. Aqara offers end-to-end solutions – including software, hardware and cloud platform – along with high levels of expertise to provide similar breakthroughs for professionals across the telecom industry.

Carriers can capitalize on collaborations with software vendors and manufacturers to create connected home solutions. They can also tap into the potential for specialized IoT deployments that address the needs of specific vertical industries, such as real estate development. As adoptions of smart home and real-time analytics grows, Aqara offers a decade of IoT and home automation experience to help carriers augment and enhance their current smart home and IoT initiatives.

Seize IoT Opportunities with Smart Home Expert

Specializing in the smart home and IoT industry since 2009, Aqara has years of experience in low-power communication protocols such as Zigbee, NB-IoT and BLE. The company has a broad product portfolio of more than 700 SKUs and offers capabilities to develop and provide customizable solutions for various use scenarios, such as security, internal environment controls, and automation control systems along with child and elder care.

Openness and interoperability have been a focus of Aqara since the very beginning and for years Aqara devices and solutions have featured a wide compatibility with almost all major smart home systems. As an early participant of the Matter program, the company has been working across the industry with key stakeholders – such as Apple, Google and Samsung – to deliver Matter devices that ensure seamless interoperability and enhanced user experiences.

The Aqara platform offers deep industry integration to provide smart home engineers with efficient tools and intelligent solutions. It provides an open, collaborative environment for creating IoT-enabled software and hardware products that employ HTTP APIs for 3rd party application calls that activate device status queries, remote control, linkage configurations and other functions. Aqara also supports deployment on partner’s private cloud, which delivers strong data privacy, faster cloud-data throughputs and seamless smart home user experiences.

With a diverse clientele across residential and office buildings, hospitality, elderly care,  education and even agriculture sectors, Aqara helps its partners to accelerate IoT software and hardware development, reducing construction time, operation overhead and maintenance costs. The company has also partnered with more than a dozen of global carriers including Celcom, China Mobile, China Telecom, Far EasTone, LG U+, Maxis, M1 and Singtel.

Most people link smart home to Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Apple and Google and dozens of vendors like Aqara. But telcos are uniquely positioned within the ecosystem thanks to their already well-established relationships with the vast numbers of end-users through mobile and fixed broadband plans. With Aqara’s profound knowledge in smart home deployment and the broad IoT segment, its carrier partners can focus on creating end-to-end solutions and services that best address the local market demand and bring the connected home experience to more households.