SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest cellular
provider, will roll out in October, a new “digital smart home”
service. It will enable customers to monitor and control their homes
remotely using cell phones, and the Internet, through SK Telecom’s
service offerings. A key enabler of SK Telecom’s new Intelligent Home
Network Service is a ZigBee wireless networking technology from Ember
Corporation. ZigBee, a global wireless industry standard that
addresses the unique needs of remote monitoring, control and sensor
networks, has become the preferred technology for home automation and
control, among other applications.
The first phase of the digital home service rollout will offer a range
of Ember-enabled wireless devices, sensors and services to monitor and
control appliances, lights, smoke detectors, intrusion detectors,
climate controls, gas valves and electronic door locks, all linked to
the Internet wirelessly via a ZigBee-based residential gateway.
Customers can monitor and control the devices themselves – both
remotely and in the home – using SK Telecom’s 24×7 home monitoring
service. The tiered services will be offered for both new and existing
homes.
SK Telecom’s service, which is currently in field tests in 400 Korean
households, recently won the “Intelligent Home Network Innovation
Award” from the Korean government. It is part of a massive government
digital home initiative aimed at connecting three to four million
households through home networking systems by 2007. Commercial
availability of the service is slated for Q’4 2005 in Korea, with
plans to make the technology available globally through licensing
agreements with telecommunications providers in other regions.
“SK Telecom selected Ember’s 802.15.4/ZigBee-compliant semiconductors
and networking software to wirelessly enable its devices due to
maturity and completeness of Ember’s platform,” said an SK Telecom
spokesperson. “Ember had the most mature and feature-rich ZigBee
platform and tools on the market, enabling us to reduce our product
development time dramatically,” he said.
TSC Systems, based in Seoul, South Korea was the system integrator for
the project. “Korea is the most wired nation in the world, with
broadband connectivity in more than three-quarters of all households,”
said Sungchul Sohn, CEO of TSC Systems. “Ember is the most robust,
scalable and reliable ZigBee platform, also offering a feature rich
suite of development tools. We believe that SK Telecom’s Ember –
enabled Intelligent Home Network Service will help proliferate ZigBee
as the standard for wireless home monitoring and control in the
region.”
Ember’s ZigBee system is particularly well suited for low-power,
low-data-rate applications that help make homes and buildings safer
and consume less energy. In addition to SK Telecom, Ember’s networking
platform is already in commercial deployments in applications for home
control and monitoring, asset tracking, commercial lighting control
and automatic meter reading.
About ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to
enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked,
monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The
ZigBee Alliance is a rapidly growing, non-profit industry consortium
of leading semiconductor manufacturers, technology providers, OEMs,
and end-users worldwide. Membership is open to all. Additional
information can be found at www.zigbee.org.
About Ember Corporation
Ember Corporation develops ZigBee-compliant wireless semiconductor
solutions that help automate homes, make buildings consume less
energy, enable manufacturing plants to run with fewer breakdowns, and
keep the country’s borders and infrastructure safe and secure. With
more than 120 customers, Ember’s vision is to help create an “Internet
of things” by enabling the eight billion microcontrollers built into
products each year to support low-cost, low-power networking
applications in any industry. Headquartered in Boston with offices and
distributors worldwide, the company is a lead promoter of the ZigBee
Alliance and its platform is the National Technical Systems’ (NTS)
“Golden Suite” for 802.15.4/ZigBee interoperability testing. For more
information, please visit www.ember.com.
