Many service providers regard the smart home market as a major potential opportunity and telcos and network operators certainly do have the great advantage of their enormous scale but that reach will not, in itself, be enough to guarantee success. The sheer number of smart home and IoT platform now being developed is fragmenting the market and broadband service providers will only harm themselves by insisting on building their own expensive disparate standalone proprietary platforms, most of which will fail, while the US West Coast OTT players wait to move in and grab market share. Jon Carter says the way to keep the predators at bay is to accept that the way forward is for traditional and established CSPs and telcos to stop competing pointlessly with one another and to adopt an open ecosystem approach that embraces all industry standards. After all, the smart home and IoT platform "is neither where the value-add is nor where the money is", hence DT's enthusiasm to work with others on a common approach and architecture to enable all players to follow their own routes to areas where they really can add value.

FILMED AT: Broadband World Forum 2016, ExCeL Convention Centre, London