Smart home service provider Comcast recently closed the deal to acquire Icontrol Networks and meanwhile, announced it will establish an IoT Center of Excellence in Austin, Texas, where Icontrol is based.
Comcast revealed the deal back in June of 2016 and closed fully recently. Xfinity Home, Comcast’s smart home department, has started to adopt Icontrol’s service for monitoring functionality. The closed acquisition is expected to give Comcast greater power in the home security segment, directing related R&D resources and accelerating Xfinity Home’s innovation progress.
The establishment of the IoT Center of Excellence in Austin is the deal’s another benefit. The city has been growing and attracted many engineering talents in recent years. Comcast hopes to attract them to design IoT innovations and connect the team with the ones in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley to further develop the IoT business while creating a better customer experience.
Meanwhile, Icontrol’s products will become a new wholesale line of business for Xfinity Home, which provides a home security and automation service platform. For instance, Icontrol’s Converge platform powers users’ touch-control panel and network foundation, connecting and monitoring all the connected devices at home, such as sensors, door locks, thermostats and security cameras.
The Converge platform also enables other multiple-service operator companies’ smart home businesses, including Time Warner Cable, Cox and other firms in Australia, Canada and Japan.
Xfinity Home already enables users to remotely monitor their home via video, set alerts for suspicious activities at home and control smart devices. According to Comcast, more roadmaps to address new customers, both domestic and international, will be announced in the near future.
Comcast has also created its machineQ industrial IoT trial venture, deploying low-power wide-area IoT networks in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley. Use cases focus more on B2B applications including utility metering and asset tracking.