One of the more obvious use cases is remote control of devices – say you want to turn the heating on remotely, then at some point it's going to have to communic

One of the more obvious use cases is remote control of devices – say you want to turn the heating on remotely, then at some point it's going to have to communicate outside the network. Or if you have a remotely-accessible camera. Or an alarm system that notifies you when it goes off. Or a locking system, and so on. I'm not arguing that this is a good thing, but it does explain why the devices want remote access. In an ideal world, this would function through some kind of home hub device – a single point of communication between "outside" and "inside", which has many clear benefits. In practice, it's going to be difficult to do this; devices don't use any kind of shared protocol or system that would enable this. I am currently working on an 'IoT' project, and it also connects to a central server, directly, over wifi, for exactly these reasons. It's hard to see what other approaches are possible at this stage, until there is some kind of industry-wide standard that's actually used by manufacturers.