Next Week I am moderating a webinar with Wind River (News - Alert). It should be fun and I hope you will join us.

I bring it up because I spent the day listening to a number of service providers promising the network of the future: 3G HSPA+, LTE, WiMAX (News - Alert) are great technical stories, but I keep getting the sense that the devices are going to need to be optimized for multiple networks.

In the Device, Network, Application [DNA] of our machine to machine future, I think see a hodgepodge of network designs with all of it trying to bring speed and performance. What strikes me is that with so many different designs the end points will have alternatives and that usually is experienced in software.

I had a discussion with Broadcom (News - Alert) last week about the connected home and I was struck by how much networking we are using already and how the smart home has to be managed.

Their reference system was built on Android (News - Alert) and like Sridan's HomeGenie, it does a lot of interesting solutions for self management. One of the more interesting pieces was the equivalent of a home intercom system using the TV set and their tablets.

Broadcom is also becoming active in the home-metering side of smart grid.

They were showing a solution ideal for carriers to deliver the smart home and strangely had not run into any requests to turn their product into a femtocell. 

On the other hand the Femto folks reported that 56 percent of Americans want a femto, "when they know what it is that a femto does." Lots of jokes come to mind here, but we will let them go for now.

The point is that we are not at the point where anyone is comfortable with a winner take all strategy. The wars about technology and what wins has little to do with the practical implementation that the users and carriers are facing.

I expect in October at our M2M conference what we will be hearing are the dollars and sense of building out now with an eye to future, but not a requirement for unlimited bandwidth. The ROI of implementing solutions can be found today just on the end points being able to stay connected. The network has to be reliable and if it's not the software has to take over.