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The Smart Home in 2025: Outlook and Opportunities

The Smart Home in 2025: Outlook and Opportunities 

This week, Jennifer Kent, Vice President of Research at Parks Associates, joined Fiber for Breakfast and shared insights into the latest trends and innovations shaping the smart home market. Parks Associates has been tracking and analyzing the home automation space for almost 40 years and is seeing some trends shift in how consumers are using this technology, what is happening in terms of competition, and how all of these connected devices impact Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the broadband fiber services they offer or will offer to the home.

Kent presented four main themes from her most recent research findings:  

  • Smart Home Market Growth 
  • Smart Home Devices Buyers 
  • Smart Home Device Interoperability 
  • Opportunities ahead for ISPs, particularly those in fiber broadband  

Showcasing a 10-year view, the average U.S. internet household has about 17 connected devices and according to Parks’ research about 45% of U.S. internet households now own at least one smart home device. Most of that comes in consumer electronics (CE), not counting smart speakers and TV displays, but they do count devices such as lights, locks, thermostats, video doorbells, cameras, and garage door openers. Kent also mentioned that connected device number could include things like health devices or connected fitness equipment.  

Parks’ research shows that the usage of these devices has changed significantly over the last several years. In 2018 before the pandemic, about 60% of smart home device owners self-identified as innovators and were one of the first people to go out and buy new technology. That’s down to just 11% of all smart home device owners today. People now are a little more cautious about buying new smart home technology and wait until the devices are on several generations later and proven before purchasing.  

As more people get more devices in the household, now comes the potential of interoperability issues since the devices they’re buying generally don’t come from the same provider. The research showed that people are using a variety of apps and control platforms which become painful to control and manage. Consumers are begging for a single streamlined dashboard where they can manage their smart home devices easily and efficiently. The jury is still out as to whether the smart home device vendor or the ISP will work towards a solution. This will be a space to watch for future innovation.

So what’s the opportunity ahead? Kent stated that there are clearly opportunities for ISPs beyond just being the legacy internet provider. Once they can get past just offering a “bundled service” there lies new value-added service types that could benefit from putting these services on fiber broadband networks like technical support monitoring, home security monitoring, cameras and sensors to offer more of a smart Wi-Fi experience.  

To learn more about The Smart Home in 2025: Outlook and Opportunities and catch up on other previous episodes of Fiber for Breakfast here.