Jordan O'BrienO2 is diversifying its phone business, with the company bringing its contract-led business model to the world of the smart home – and it’s called O2 Home.
It launched in September in select areas in the South East of the UK, and is the latest push from high street retailers to entice consumers into getting smart home devices. While many retailers already sell these devices, such as John Lewis and Currys PC World, O2 wants to offer the chance of a smart home at a relatively low buy-in cost.
O2’s solution is similar to how it handles phone purchases. Rather than forcing users to pay £600 for a phone upfront, the company instead charges users a monthly fee towards the cost and gives them the phone for free, or for a small charge. This is how the company plans to run its O2 Home offering – with smart home ‘packs’ offering things like sensors, IP cameras, a smart thermostat, and smart plugs all for one monthly fee – with no upfront cost. What’s more, users get free installation and free support for as long as their contract is active.
The free installation and support is the key to O2’s plans. The company commissioned a survey before launching its O2 Home initiative and it claims that 75% of Brits want to live in a smart home but over 60% are put off by a lack of tech confidence. 47% also listed concerns over price as a reason for not adopting smart home technology.
Through its all-in packages, O2 Home allows users to call in with issues as many times as they wish. O2 staff will then endeavour to fix the issue for the customer and if not, send out an engineer to fix those issues – free of charge. O2 will also perform an annual health check on all the equipment to ensure it’s running as it should – which again, is included in the monthly fee.
Three packages are offered to customers who want to get started with a smart home. These are:
- O2 Home Comfort (£30 per month) includes the O2 Smart Hub, a tado smart thermostat, two smart plugs and one presence sensor
- O2 Home View (£30 per month) includes the O2 Smart Hub, a Samsung camera, wide view camera, one open and close sensor and one presence sensor
- O2 Home Connect (£20 per month) includes the O2 Smart Hub, two presence sensors, two open and close sensors and two smart plugs.
While these packages are extremely basic, and nothing compared to the sort of technology one could get with a fully custom installed solution – it’s a great entry point for users who want to get over that initial learning curve. Users are also free to add-on more advanced products after purchasing the initial pack.
These additional devices include things like the Yale Keyfree Connected smart lock, a Fibaro flood sensor, Powerline adaptor and many more. The downside to these additional options is it comes at a cost – users can’t simply spread out the cost like with they can with the packages, instead they have to cough up the cash up front. Users still get free installation and free support however, something they won’t get purchasing the device elsewhere.
Currently O2 Home is extremely limited, meaning it’s likely of little threat to custom installers – after all, can a Tado smart thermostat and a couple of cameras really compete with a Crestron or Control4 system? Well, no. But for users getting their first taste of a smart home – it could be ideal.
For the average consumer, the offerings that O2 currently has in its stable will be enough – sure there’s no lighting solution and smart plugs aren’t anywhere near as versatile as integrated solutions, but not everyone needs or wants that. O2 does say that it will be looking at expanding the range of compatible technologies in the future however, although it stops short of making any announcements.
To add more devices, those devices have to support O2’s Home Hub. It’s another smart home system, like SmartThings, like Insteon – but it’s based on an established system. In order to bring its smart home offering to its customer, O2 partnered with AT&T and repurposed its Digital Life platform for a UK audience – that platform already supports lighting control and garage door controllers however, meaning it’s possible for O2 to do the same in the UK.