Indian Telecom Giant Airtel planning a foray into SmartHomes Market

Indian telecom giant Airtel which is into Mobile services, landline services, Wireless and Broadband Internet services, and the recently launched Payments Bank has plans of entering into a totally new domain.
This is the domain of smart homes, or automated homes. These are Homes where appliances such as TV, Refrigerator, Laptop, smartphones, cooling or heating systems, lightning and even security systems.
Smart Homes systems are ones where all these or some of these systems “talk” to each other. Or, these systems can be controlled by smartphones of other computing devices.
The underlying and upcoming technology is “Internet of Things” – IOT in short. This is a protocol for machine to machine talk which is already in place in some of the computational systems, cloud systems as well as even in Data centres but is evolving.
How smarthomes work is :
Supposedly a cooling system is cooling a home too much. Then, it can send an alert to a smartphone or a laptop to automatically adjust the cooling.
A similar grid like system can control:
-Level and Intensity of lightning or switching certain areas’ light on or off.
-Level of warming in a centrally heated system- This can even have commercial uses.
-A water leakage in a pipe can also trigger an alert and give a call to a plumber.
-Security alarm can be set in case of an intruder comes in a house- This is in some ways already implemented in some of the security setups.
Such systems will not be easy to setup. There will be programming skills in automation technologies. Such programmers will need to be versed with complex algorithms for working of such systems.
A lot of research is already underway.
Then, there will be management of electronics that will be involved. There could also be wiring involved, or setup of signal boosters. Let us see how this all works.

 
Source: Based on an article in Economic Times Newspaper website: 25-Apr-2017