People Don’t Care About Home Networking — Nor Should They

Has the home network gone as far as it it can possibly go? I find myself wondering after reading the thoughts of Mike Masnick from The Feature. Apparently most people that don’t have a home network are perfectly happy with the way things are. My thoughts are that many of them are either not aware of the benefits of have one, or are simply not into dealing with ‘one more thing’ that can go wrong.

When nearly 90% of people without a home network claim they have no interest in one it’s likely to generate both some headlines, and some worries in the industry that maybe the market is already saturated. However, the details of the study suggest the problem isn’t one to be too concerned about.

The study simply asked people whether or not they wanted a home network — which is going to be completely meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know why they would want a home network. What would have been much more interesting is to have the same study ask people whether or not they would be interested in a variety of services that were only possible with a home network.

This doesn’t, however, absolve the industry from the marketing task at hand. Rather than focusing on selling home networking equipment or (the oh-so-catchy “customer premise equipment”), networking equipment providers need to be working to convince others to build out the applications, devices and services that make use of the network. In other words, instead of thinking of the network as the end product, vendors have to realize it’s a platform, and no platform catches on without applications to make it valuable. That also means making it work easily. Unfortunately, as “standardized” as something like Wi-Fi is, it’s still confusing and difficult for many users to set up.