DALLAS -- FTTH Council Expo -- The fiber-to-the-home industry needs to collaboratively tackle the issue of growing complexity in the digital home, including in-home wireless, says Robert Mudge, president of consumer and mass business markets for Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ).

The proliferation of wireless devices and of potential applications such as in-home healthcare will require a new approach to managing bandwidth inside the home that doesn't depend on frequent upgrades to networking devices and highly sophisticated network integration, Mudge said in his keynote address here today.

Expecting consumers to figure it out on their own or to be willing to purchase new consumer premises equipment (CPE) every 12 to 18 months is a formula for failure, he said, and could even turn fancy fiber services into commodities on which others innovate.

"We need to collaborate as a group to help create a simple and seamless experience in the home," Mudge said. In a conversation after the presentation, he added that this could include routers or residential gateways that enable a consistent experience and stability for the home technology user over a period of years, not months.

"We need to keep understanding what kind of bandwidth will have to be distributed within the home and make sure we have routers to keep pace, and devices that can talk to each other," Mudge added. "We also need to decide as an industry what we can do, what's too much, and what are the cost implications."

He said simplicity for the customer will be a major focus for Verizon going forward in order to not only continue driving the new applications that create demand for FTTH, but also retain customers and avoid becoming a commodity pipe.

A failure to continue to deliver on integration of in-home devices and technologies into the broadband service will cause customers to "lose faith" in their service providers, Mudge said. Successfully solving the home bandwidth distribution and device integration issue will, conversely, open up new paths to greater revenue.

And now the shameless plug: Both Robert Mudge and the digital home debate will be front and center next month at TelcoTV -- it's not to late to join us.— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading