Chatter filling up a home is usually a welcomed site during weekends when friends and family come over to visit.

What about the invisible chatter around the home? Invisible? How can *sound* be invisible? In this case, ‘sound’ is actually noise, data noise. The endless communication streams of ones and zeros flying across our spaces, from the smart speaker sitting on the kitchen countertop, to the WIFI router on the floor in the living room. This ‘chatter’ is invisible – we cannot see it (if we don't look for it) but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Just because a human being isn’t moving their lips and sound isn’t coming out of their mouth doesn’t mean there isn’t anything going on. They are still communicating to themselves, they are processing information and making sense of it. In the same way that a smart speaker doesn’t show any visible signs of it being in use, it too is also still communicating with itself, others around the home, and its home servers which could be located on the other side of the world. In fact, these smart devices, also known as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are producing constant communication, so your home is never actually ‘silent’, it’s got a mind of its own, and it’s only becoming more chaotic.

The Rise of the Smart Home

Smart home revenues are projected to reach US$77 billion in 2020 (Statista, 2020). There are many aspects to a smart home such as lighting, heating, entertainment, security and so on. What proportion of the total revenues do these categories take, and what does it say about the mind-set of the people implementing smart homes around the world?

In 2020, Smart Appliances are ranked as the highest segment of the smart home industry, accumulating $28,461 million. This segment ‘includes the essential equipment (connected and remote-control devices) and services that are part of an intelligent home network’. (Statista, 2020). For example, smart speakers from Google and Amazon and central control units, such as hubs, which they sell. There is clearly demand for these types of devices by the consumer. Taking a look at the speakers available from the two biggest smart home companies today, we can see that they both have a variety of devices on sale at varying price points meaning if you want a smart speaker you don’t have to fork out hundreds of pounds.

What does the future look like?

There are 220 million smart homes, a 16% increase from 2019. More smart homes means there is a growing market for smart devices, especially affordable devices.

In the UK alone, the industry is expected to increase by 125% by 2025, with the Smart Appliances segment increasing by 140%.

Worldwide, the industry will expand by 127%. Again, the Smart Appliances segment will experience the largest increase of them all, by 137%.

What does this mean for the non-stop bickering Smart Home?

A Smart Home could be considered as a living organism. Communication between online services and the user allow smart homes to be dynamic, understanding the user’s needs and creating it’s own responses to them.

What could the Smart Home of the future look like? First, lets understand what the Smart Home of today gets up to.

The racing bar chart below shows a 24 hour period of data being transmitted to and from a wide range of Smart Appliances including; a Samsung Smart TV; Philips Hue lighting; Google Nest speakers; Google Nest Cameras; TP Link smart plugs, a Lenovo Smart Display and an IP camera system.

The most noticeable result from this data is that there is always communication throughout the day, it never stops. Most devices within the home are never reaching '0' packets being sent, in any hour.

Bear in mind this is not showing the size of communication packets, it's showing how often the devices are producing communication throughout each hour of the day. Even when devices aren't actively being used, they are transmitting packets of data to servers around the world, and other devices on the network. The home is always bickering.

The chart above shows the breakdown of data per device during each hour of the day. Noticeable results include the Lenovo Smart Display transmitting the most data, in length, throughout the whole day, also during every hour of the day. Looking back at the racing bar chart, it shows the Lenovo Display producing the most communication throughout the dayt too. However, some devices produce less communication but each stream is longer in length. For example.... The largest data transmitting hour for this day was 2pm, and the lowest 9am. We can infer that as the data was gathered on a Sunday, we most likely slept in therefore data packets were 'minimal' in the morning, and then extremely high activity at 2pm.

The least data producing device is the IP CCTV Camera system with very low amounts of data, in comparison to the other devices, being produced for only 2 hours in the day. This makes sense. This system doesn’t store recordings to the cloud, it saves them locally in a hard drive unlike Google’s Nest Cameras. The data packets begun when there was motion detected and an image was saved to Dropbox.

Taking a look specifically at the TP Link Kasa Smart Plug, this is a device which is probably only used physically a handful of times a day. However, the device is producing constant communication throughout the day. Who is it communicating with? From my data file, I can see that the plug is creating a ‘broadcast’ through my home network, asking all the devices connected “who has 192.168.1.26? Tell Smart Plug”. At the time, this IP address, 192.168.1.26, was being used by a Google Home speaker. Now, I am not 100% sure why the plug needs to know who ‘has’ the Google speaker, but if I had to guess it’s got to do with the Google Home app which presents all smart devices so the user can turn them on/off. Another similar instance is the plug wants to know who is connected to 192.168.1.1, the Wi-Fi router, meaning it want to know all the devices currently connected to the internet.

Is this useful information for the plug? Or is it being collected and being sent back to TP Link's servers? What could they need with this information?

The Future

We know that smart home penetration is inevitable and will increase dramatically over the next 5 years. Therefore, the amount of data generated from smart appliances will not only increase for individual households, but also globally. How this data is regulated, and who will have access to it, is of concern today but will be even more so in the future. If users had access to data for their own smart homes, would this affect their choices when purchasing smart appliances? In my experience, I am not put off from buying IoT devices just yet.