What Makes Routers Special in the Smart Home?
I have always believed that the router was a special and important device in the smart home. As the first stop in the connectivity path inside the home, routers (and mesh WiFi systems) are different from other devices at home. They are the first stop for all traffic and security - a device that allows connectivity to other devices and also, protecting them from the big bad world out there. Over the years, this quality is the basis for the router incorporating features such as internet security, parental controls etc. With the popularity of smart home devices now, especially the WiFi devices, we can add home automation, home security to the list. All these services are on top of the device management and firmware update services that are necessary for the healthy functioning of the device.
The advent of the mesh routing has added to the work load on the old girl! Spotty WiFi has been the bugbear of the large homes in the US and remedying it has been lucrative to Google, Linksys and Netgear lately and has been in the eyes of the internet service providers every where. While today the emphasis in mesh routing is on the coverage, as the internet speeds continue to climb, optimizing throughput performance across the home and among the devices will be the name of the game in 2020 and beyond, in the US and everywhere. We should expect to hear a lot more about Self Organizing Networks (SON) shortly.
Modular OS for the Home
With this explosion of services managed by the router, prior models of the custom devices with custom operating systems (OS) has outlived its purpose. While many vendors have contributed to and depended on OpenWrt, most commercial products are only loosely based on OpenWrt. Specific needs of roadmap of services required deviation from the OpenWrt standard release. But, over the years, as the number of services grew, this model was not sustainable any more.
Complexity of delivery of multiple services over different versions of hardware is driving the need for a modular OS. A modular OS could allow for a write-once-and-done client applications which will improve the user experience, decrease the time to market and maintenance cost for service delivery. This has been recognized very early by many of the service providers which led to RDK and softathome. More recently, prpl has also jumped on the bandwagon trying to solve this same problem, but, based on the OpenWrt base code.
At a high level, RDK, softathome and prpl are all implementing some version of the modular OS layers shown in the figure below. It accomplishes two things. By introducing a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), the OS becomes largely independent of the hardware. Application frameworks and containers further free the applications from both the hardware and the OS, allowing the application developers to be able to "write-once-and-done".
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| Modular OS for Home Device |
History is Repeating!
If this diagram feels familiar, it should be! Other than the routing and WiFi services, it resembles a typical smartphone OS today. The similarity in the model is not accidental! Similar to the services on the home devices today, the services on the cellphones (now called feature phones) increased back in the early 2000's. In response, the cellphone manufacturers like Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola and others started experimenting with modular operating systems for the cellphones.
Home devices are at the same crossroads as the cellphones were in 2005/ 2006. Evidently, several options of OS are already available. So, what can we learn from that era?
The Battle of the Phone OS'
Mobile operators, just like today's internet service providers, were incentivized to control the devices and the services that flowed through them. And, they have had a history of working together to create inter-operable, standards based network technologies through the 3GPP. Options, then as now, were abundant. Apart from Symbian from Nokia, Windows from Microsoft and Blackberry, multi-vendor initiative LiMo and open source MeeGo were contenders. Yet, iOS and Android prevailed.Creating 3GPP standards, I would contend, is different from creating a modular OS. The careful orchestration of the roadmap for application frameworks and HAL as the needs of the developers evolve and the technology behind the hardware leaps is difficult to achieve without a strong entity investing in the OS by employing thousands of software developers, which Google and Apple were. The ecosystem required not just the initial standardization and coding, but, continuous support to all the ecosystem partners. This needed leadership that is difficult to achieve in a collective process such as the 3GPP or a Linux Foundation. Google and Apple nicely filled in this role.
We also can not downplay the importance of the outsider status of Google and Apple in that battle. While service providers and chipset and hardware vendors participated, Google was the outsider and the lead protagonist in Android. Every service provider, chipset and hardware vendor knew that none of their direct competitors had an advantage with the Android platform.
How Will the Home Devices Battle Shape Up?
These two lessons are important for the home devices OS market. While RDK and softathome are driven by different service providers, prpl is driven by chipset and hardware vendors. None of them enjoy the same advantages as either Google or Apple had in the phone OS.
So, who are some contenders this time? Amazon is clearly throwing its hat in the ring with the Eero acquisition and its vast experience with Fire OS. We can not discount Apple and Google, despite Amazon's lead in smart speakers. Their vast experience with phone, computer OS' and obvious ambitions in smart home make them difficult to ignore.
So, who might be our dark horse? I nominate Facebook. Why? Facebook already dipped its toes in the smart home market with the Facebook Portal. With Terragraph, it has some street cred in internet service provider market. The icing on the cake is Oculus Go, the OS for VR headsets Facebook has acquired. So, OS experience covered there. With 5G, the time is ripe for the convergence in VR experience between home (fixed) and mobile experiences. So, the question is not whether Facebook would want to step into this market. The question is why would it not?
