Convergence Transforms Digital Home: Techno-Economic Impact

Abstract

This paper discusses the past, the present, and the future of digital home and in particular, how convergence transforms home networking. It describes technology adoption-, consumer-, and behavioural-trends and discusses the business impact from consumer demand for “living in real-time” and from the convergence of applications, services, networks, and terminals. With the explosion of mobile and broadband usage with high Wi-Fi penetration at home and emerging trends such as online social networks, mashups, blogs, etc. will create unparalleled value to customers that will disrupt existing business models of fixed and mobile operators. Consumers expect access to applications and services instantaneously, irrespective of the location, place and all at real-time. Telco’s and business are beginning to understand how those behavioural trends, and convergence could have major impact on their service offering, marketing, products, price, go-to-market and how they can leverage these trends to attract and seek global talents. Proliferation of IP enabled device and applications will lead to the development of IP-based home networking in the areas of personal communications, network entertainment, communications and monitoring & management. Finally, a new law was established that will drive the future development of digital home, E = mc³, where E equates to Entertainment experience, m for media (content) and c³ for convergence of communications, computing technologies and consumer electronics. Success of home networking will heavily depend on industries ability to hide networks and systems complexities from end-users where simplicity of the user interface is the key.