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Your telecom carrier: The enabler of your connected home?

Telecom carriers---Verizon, AT&T and Sprint---are scrambling to be the hub of your digital life and the center of the connected home.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Telecom carriers---Verizon, AT&T and Sprint---are scrambling to be the hub of your digital life and the center of the connected home.

The move, which was highlighted by Verizon at its investor day Tuesday, isn't all that surprising. The wireless market is a bit saturated. With that backdrop, Verizon, Sprint and AT&T are all eyeing machine-to-machine connections, enabling healthcare monitoring services and plan to launch energy conservation tools.

Add it up and telecom carriers are plotting a bigger role in cloud computing and analytics too. Mixed with infrastructure, these carriers could be on to something.

Referring to Verizon's FiOS network, president and chief operating officer Lowell McAdam said:

We are also really excited about the opportunity FiOS brings to further transform the broadband experience and deliver a whole suite of broadband services for the home, and you saw a few of those in the back of the room earlier this morning. We see that fiber connected home becoming the hub for managing all aspects of the customer's digital life. Now what is bringing this long-predicted vision to life is the increasing number of connected devices in the home combined with that high-speed connections and a flood of Web-based content that needs to be managed. And when you layer on the social trends like energy conservation, telework, environmental concerns, we see tremendous opportunity for companies that deliver a truly efficient, integrated connected home solution.

In a graphic, this connected home goes like this:

The issue is that Verizon's concept isn't exactly new. You can see the day quickly coming where multiple companies---Cisco, GE, Microsoft and Intel to name a few---are going to compete to be your technology provider.

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This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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