We’re living in a digitally connected age with more and more of our life becoming electronically connected. Verizon is increasing their service offerings to the residential home market. For the prices of their equipment and a recurring monthly fee, they will provide services which will allow you to monitor your home via cameras and other devices embedded in your home.
Steven Castle writes in his article “Verizon Plans to Expand Home Connectivity Services” that Verizon will offer the ability to monitor “whole-house electricity usage in its Energy Control and Home Monitoring and Control Kits”. Some of the functionality of these offerings will be limited until power companies complete their rollout of the smart-grid to home. In addition devices available for sale on Verizon’s website allow you to monitor and control your home thermostat and even include light and appliance switch controls.
The article goes on to explain how in may be possible in the future for your medical provider to monitor your health remotely using a services like this.
What we think at NextGen Digital Home:
This technology is all very new and not even available in all areas. For example, Verizon’s current offering is only available for their broadband customers but they are designing the services to be used on any broadband provider. It’s also not clear, whether the monitoring equipment you purchase from them would be compatible with a service from another provider, or even your own home network.
This is a huge, new market potential for these companies. The article mentions that other companies – ADT, Comcast, Verizon, Vivint, and Alarm.com – are also in this market.
Our own personal opinion is that it would be better to have your own home network which you can use to implement these kinds of monitoring and controls. Personally, I’m not real thrilled about having these companies gain access to our home environment. It is one thing for them to provide entertainment content via their cable offerings, but quite another for them to know how we live.
