Will There Be a PBX in Your Smart Home Network?

Verizon (News - Alert) is the latest company to try to untie the knot and become king of the home network. At the Digital Home Summit Ann Shaub, Director of Product Management at Verizon, announced a first quarter rollout of the Verizon “connected home portfolio.” Two communication protocols, one wired and one wireless but both proprietary, were mentioned. On the wire – well, ok, on the coax – we have MoCA for all the home entertainment devices. In the air we have Z-Wave for everything else. The announcement also mentioned a “bring-your-own-broadband option.”

First, as there is to be a common control for all devices then there must be a box that all the various networks plug into. At first blush this would seem to be nothing more than the well-known and field-proven Internet model of internetworking. But given the architecture, most likely it’s not. In the Internet model you can wrap the Internet packets in whatever envelope you like for carriage over your communication lines and when I open up the envelope at the other end what I find is described in the IETF specifications; a TCP packet, an HTTP packet, a VoIP packet, whatever. This is what makes the “inter” part of Internet work.

One doesn’t have to squint too hard at an IP phone to see the in-home interface to Verizon’s integrated home network. Nor does one have to be a Harvard MBA to figure out that putting a PBX in people’s homes is going to be a non-starter. Backhaul all the control signals, perform translation and security operations in lights-out bunkers with shared heavy-duty compute power and pay for the whole thing by selling broad-spectrum, fine-grain home activity and preference data to the highest bidders.