Kurt Scherf, VP and Principal Analyst at research/analyst company Parks Associates, echoes these sentiments. “There is a lot of debate about how much intelligence will sit in the home. We are now hearing from service providers and infrastructure providers who want to base a lot of intelligence in the network but I don’t think that is going to be the answer for everyone. If a service provider is aggressive about deploying new set-top boxes they are going to be looking at deploying more intelligence in the home.”

Scherf at Parks Associates believes there is an important, but unsexy, function that must also be acknowledged in any discussion about the Connected Home. This is managing the Quality of Experience for consumers.

“Service providers will need to control the number of support calls and the costs they bring,” he declares. “Although the home network has the benefit of increasing customer satisfaction, it also comes with the risk of increased support calls as people struggle with home network configurations and security settings.

“That means there is value in providing troubleshooting, diagnostics and [customer care] agent intervention. The service provider wants to be sure it can measure the connection between the gateway and a set-top box and measure video quality between those two points, which becomes an important issue. You need some basic remote management capabilities in the home.”

Scherf says the service provider can take responsibility for the home network QoS, measuring traffic on the home network. In some cases they could go as far as transcoding video to a format that suits the available bandwidth in the home, and they can be the traffic manager for the data packets going around the local network. “Service providers can make some determination about which packets get priority over others. A physical device like the home gateway would perform the role of acting as an arbitrator among connected devices,” he suggests.

From the article, "Connected Home: the stakes are raised" by John Moulding, issue 4

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