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The UK and Europe must come together to fight against the might of Amazon and other tech giants, or the smart home sector will be lost to them, says Deutsche Telekom.
Jon Carter, the firm’s UK head of business development for the connected home, was speaking to PCR at the Smart Home Summit today in London.
"The danger of this event is that it’s a wake," he said. "Everyone here is focused too much on competing with each other – and aren’t focusing on the customer.
"We need to start with the customer. Why do they want any of this?
"If we’re not careful, Amazon, Google/Nest, Apple Homekit and Samsung will have 90 per cent of the smart home market in the future.
"They will own this market, the customer and the value. What we’re trying to do at Deutsche Telekom is saying Europe can fight back and drive growth from this market. But the approach has to be about all of us working together."
Carter’s comments come after a Context report found that over half of UK consumers haven’t heard of the term ‘smart home’.
Carter says that by working together and using an open platform, the smart home sector can prosper – and not be dominated by a small handful of tech giants.
"We believe it’s about having open platforms," Carter added.
"We launched the Tolino- e-reader, the largest e-reader in Germany. We delivered an open approach with this."
Deutsche Telekom also has a white label smart home platform that can be used by telco firms, retailers and product manufacturers, which Carter says can help "foster a strong level of growth" and provide opportunities for firms to work together.
The company ships two and a half million routers each year, and those routers will have Deutsche Telekom’s own smart home platform embedded on it.
The news comes after Deutsche Telekom published a report: ‘How to create growth from the connected home’. It states that the smart home market could be worth over €15.46 billion annually by 2019, with 50 million Western European homes having installed IoT technology.
You can read more at www.connectedhomeplatform.telekom.net
