Service providers planning on launching home networking services face any number of challenges, but one of the most formidable and unpredictable is the end-user.

“Possibly the single largest challenge we face in offering ‘smart home’ services is dumb users,” quips John Lindsay, carrier relations manager for Australian carrier Internode, which offers wholesale and retail ADSL2+ services.

Home networking services of all types – from DVR programming to home appliance control and advanced entertainment services – have to be simple enough so that everyone in the household understands how to use them, Lindsay said.

“Even if the person who signs up for the service understands it, if their spouse doesn’t get it, they’re the ones who will call and complain or maybe even cancel it,” he said during a smart homes panel session at Broadband World Forum Asia on Wednesday.

On the other hand, Lindsay added, a potentially even bigger worry are the really smart users who know the technology well enough to add their own boxes to the network.

“An example of that is place-shifted video solutions like Sling Media that allow you to essentially control your pay-TV box from your laptop, whether you’re across town or in a different country,” Lindsay said.

“That takes up a megabit of my upstream bandwidth. If too many of my customers start doing that, it’s going to cause me problems.”

However, that’s a risk broadband providers already face in the form of P2P traffic, which puts heavy demands on uplink bandwidth, says Teyew Sin Siew, head of telecoms research for ICT Practice Asia-Pacific at Frost & Sullivan. “We recently surveyed users in Asia on what types of lifestyle applications they’d want in a service package, and file sharing was at the top of the list,” he says.

On the bright side, solutions for managing P2P traffic already exist, and broadband access technologies are already evolving to symmetrical architectures better designed to handle heavy upstream traffic.

Thorsten Heins, board member and CTO of Siemens Communications, says that P2P can certainly “unleash the disruption potential” of broadband services and demonstrates that devices capable of distributed intelligence are sufficient for voice and data, but he views P2P more as an opportunity than a threat.

“We see it as an opportunity to create new services,” Heins says. “For example, there’s a big opportunity there to create community entertainment services with a P2P mechanism where users can create their own content and share it.”

In any case, Lindsay says that it’s unrealistic to expect that customers won’t try to plug things into their home networks, and equally unrealistic to prevent them from doing so.

“We’ve found there’s not much joy in trying to restrict them,” he said.