Broadcom sees STB the new hub of smart home

"From now and the future, the smart home industry will be one of the developing emphases for Broadcom.” said Sherman Chen, Vice President of Technology at Broadcom’s Broadband and Connectivity Group (BCG). Chen thinks the industry is still in its immature and initial period; however, there already exist some good platforms for the application software like Apple Watch and Apple Homekit. In the smart home front, who can define a better business model or enlarge the business scale to integrate and connect different components, it will lead the market upgrade to the next level.

Therefore, Broadcom just announces set-top boxes using Beacon technology. Home devices can identify users’ location through Beacon and then trigger actions based on users’ behaviors and settings. One of the benefits of Beacon is its lower power consumption compared with GPS when talking about indoor positioning. Through the integration of set-top box, it can provide customers a convenient experience. Furthermore, mobile category could be seen as the extension of moving home territory. Some devices could be connected with home devices in the view of networking.

What bring IoT ecosystem new challenges?

In Chen's observation, now IoT industry encounters challenges about the open source, it would be more difficult to support by traditional method because various and numerous users. Comparatively speaking, these diverse users will share their information and then form up the specific forum to solve problems. The connected module is important for IoT and the smart home industry.

With regards to the protocol, through his opinion, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee will be the mainstream standards in the near future. The conclusion is made from the clear evolution of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, the improvement of techniques has tackled some problems regarding penetration through walls and high power consumption.

“In general, China has huge domestic market demand and large-scale companies which are influential to consumers. Even though, Taiwan has remarkable design ability. It still takes time to observe the market trend. For example, talking to the gateway, it will transform to reinforce the function of integrating devices. Manufactures will fulfill the demand of operators to derive following manage direction.