Major U.S. retail brands and the world’s largest online retailers have launched smart home automation offerings in the past six months and more are sure to follow.

When six U.S. luxury home automation players recently opted to join forces and form a single company: VIA International. The consolidation was carried out as a partnership, not a merger or acquisition. An unusual approach, but one that nevertheless has a number of drivers that speak to the development and fragmentation of the home automation market, as well as indications of where the market is heading.

At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, I discovered Republic Wireless and learned about their new service and value proposition.  I had previously mentioned them in Competing against a Low-cost Disruptor with Policy Control and Charging.  Their pitch is to use Wi-Fi as much as possible and ride on the Sprint 3G network as a virtual operator.  Wi-Fi calls on a phone seems like a yawner, but their spin is to embed the Wi-Fi client into the mobile, and thereby simplifying the user interface.  The price is certainly attractive, $19/mo. for unlimited voice / txt / data.  The idea is that you will use Wi-Fi for your data needs at home, office, campus or Starbucks – which is what most of us do anyway.  I have a feeling that a subscriber watching YouTube Cat-Videos while on cellular would be sent packing. 

I recently attended the opening of Thales’ new Cyber Integration and Innovation Centre in the UK.  The centre is essentially a battle lab for improving the security of critical national infrastructure, as well as government and private sector organizations. Client systems are tested against a battery of open source tools and enterprise-grade security software by a team of highly-skilled technicians. Most pertinently, the lab includes a simulation of an industrial control room, complete with PLCs and SCADA systems (interchangeable with any other ICS the client may be using). Cyber attacks were run from ancillary rooms where Thales experts hijacked the ‘on-premise’ security equipment (camera feeds and the like) and launched DoS attacks to disrupt the control systems. The group stressed the importance of having the right tools to understand what was happening to the system, and good visualization of the massive amounts of data going through systems therefore plays quite an important role in being able to pick out suspicious activity from normal, everyday operations. Part of being able to counter attacks was the ability to effectively understand when an attack was occurring, and estimate the type and magnitude of the threat in order to properly respond.

Much digital ink has been spilled over the topic of data roaming fees.  As I have said previously, Fixing Mobile Telecom with Consolidation and Pricing, an operator's over-reliance on roaming "got-cha" fees is a symptom of deeper market problems.  The current EU Commission proposal to elminate roaming fees is met with great vitriol from the operators, and rightly so, as this proposal will have unanticipated consequences unless other revenue streams are developed or improved.  The operators plea for favorable consolidation should be considered as one means to help them reduce reliance on roaming fees. 

We are starting to hear a lot of references to “5G”.

There is a premise that the more subscribers an operator has, the greater economy of scale it can achieve. And yes, this is broadly correct. For example, from ABI Research’s Mobile Carrier Strategies Research Service, we have established that China Mobile is the carrier with the highest overall gross profit for 1Q 2013 (US$9,748 million), but that is very much due to the 726 million subscriptions it has on its network. However, when it comes to gross profit per subscriber, China Mobile is not even in the top 50. Instead that accolade goes to the North American (NA) mobile carriers.

Since January 2010, the head of BTRC started planning for 3G licensing and stated the operating licenses would be issued in August 2010, which attracted a number of international telecommunication companies’ interests at that time. However, August 2010 came without the regulator committing to an auction. Despite this, the state-run Teletalk proposed launching 3G services ahead of other private mobile operators.