The Wyatt FOCO, a luxury community in the Fort Collins area, will offer Xfinity Communities’ smart home platform. Xfinity Communities is Comcast’s business unit focused on residential developments and the like.
The smart home platform, which is aimed at both residents and property managers, allows controls to be managed from a mobile app. The app has a wide range of uses for the community, which spans 12 buildings containing 368 luxury units. Applications will include smart thermostats, lighting, locks and leak detectors, according to Comcast.
When new residents move into their apartment, they are granted control of the locks, lights and thermostats, via the mobile app. Both property managers and residents can monitor water leak detectors. The property features Xfinity internet and entertainment services as well.
“In addition to lights, locks and thermostat controls, we found that leak detection is the most sought-after smart home monitoring solution,” Adrian Adriano the vice president of Strategic Business Initiatives at Xfinity Communities, said in a press release. “Moving forward, we plan to connect even more smart home devices to our app for Xfinity Communities properties across the country.”
Smart home technology and business cases still are evolving. Wi-Fi – which is about to get an upgrade itself – looks to be the conduit through which much of smart home technology will be delivered. In August, Strategy Analytics said that almost 5 billion WiFi devices are in homes worldwide, with the number likely to rise to 17 billion by 2030.
A key is that once the basic connectivity and smart home infrastructure is established in the house, the services offered are more or less up to the imagination of the vendors or service providers.
These companies are being creative. For instance, in June, Comcast added a filter to its Xfinity camera that enabled artificial intelligence to be used to track pets’ activity in the home. Also in June, Charter said it is working with Apple to provide security for Apple’s HomeKit smart home platform. In March, Vivint Smart home introduced Vivint Car Guard, which enables management of both home and car security from the same app. Also in March, ABI Research said that “discreet home healthcare monitoring” will be a $34.5 billion business by 2024.
Of course, home entertainment is the pillar of the smart home sector. In January, Parks Associates – in a white paper sponsored by Calix – found that 71% of households in the United States own a connected entertainment device, with many homes having more than one.
