By Ken Kelley
OTTAWA – With the increased prevalence of employees working from home over the last 14 months, the trend has unquestionably shone a light on the importance of connectivity, and security, in our day-to-day lives. And while much has been discussed of the role that 5G technology may play in our daily lives outside of the home, the latest installment of a Canadian Wireless Telecom Association online forum, 5G Canada: What’s Next, examined how the latest wireless standard will impact different verticals and elements of society, in addition to the evolution of the connected or smart home in the 5G era.
“If you look at how important the home is from a data perspective, it’s now one of the main pots of data,” said Jefferson Wang, a 5G strategy and sales lead at Accenture.
Wang is one of four authors behind the book The Future Home in the 5G Era, which examines hyper-connected homes where devices and apps work together to respond to, as well as anticipate, customer needs. The book posits the technology will create significant opportunities for business, including communication service providers, device manufacturers and app developers across a myriad of sectors including entertainment, education, health care and more.
Rogers senior vice president of 5G, content and connected home products, Eric Bruno, said the pandemic accelerated the company’s pivot to many of the ideas and possibilities expressed in Wang’s book.
At the outset of the pandemic, Bruno said the company went from sending techs to install new services to customers driving 95% of all installations. The company then took the customer experience one step further, employing the Blitzz application to allow clients to video conference with employees, which simplified the troubleshooting process.
“We’re moving as quickly as we can to the home of the future, and one of the things that we’re so excited about is that we see 5G helping us move that forward and move forward faster,” Bruno said.
“If 5G and the hyper-connected home don’t materialize, a fair amount of our business plans are going to go up in smoke. We are not only driving towards that, but we are counting on it.” – Eric Bruno, Rogers
“It used to be you could do certain things in your home but you couldn’t do them outside of your home. I can do things whether I’m on a fiber network at home or on a 5G network outside of the home. If 5G and the hyper-connected home don’t materialize, a fair amount of our business plans are going to go up in smoke. We are not only driving towards that, but we are counting on it.”
Asked how he sees the potential future convergence of 5G and home internet services, Bruno said Rogers sees a definitive need for both technologies and he does not envision one killing off the other.
“There is stuff that folks traditionally have done in their home that they do anywhere, whether it’s listening to music, video calling or video conferencing. Those are cases which have traditionally been in the home and have been easily taken out of the home. What we see is as you begin to introduce more unlimited data plans, like Rogers has done with Infinite, people become less conscious. From our perspective, it’s making sure people feel comfortable in terms of leveraging their data whenever and wherever they are,” Bruno said.
However, with the increased proliferation of smart home devices comes an increased risk of bad actors comandeering new smart devices for nefarious purposes. Bruno said while Rogers employs robust security measures for users of its networks as well as the devices on its network, the company has to remain cognizant of customer preferences for choice and flexibility.
“It would be naïve to think we could come to market with a walled garden [of devices] and that’s it,” Bruno said, adding the company is eager to go to market with curated solutions customers find appealing.
“We have to respect customer demand for choice. We’ll work with a lot of different partners to ensure an easy and seamless experience, whether it’s a Lutron light or smart thermostat; it doesn’t have to be one that we sell, but as far as we can extend security and protection, we should, while also providing our customers the tools to manage some of that on their own,” he added.
“We do see ourselves at an advantage of being able to bring end-to-end security, but we have to make it easy for everybody. It’s easiest and most secure if [the device] is in our curated platform, but everything we touch needs to be easy and everything we touch needs to be secure.”
