Routers are "sitting idle and not doing things a lot of the time, and you can have them do more and you can run more services on them," Wingo said. "The hardware that's capable of moving video around the house or displaying software onto a screen ... those types of things can be done in the router in a lot of cases."

Through industry standards, Cisco plans to make its routers into hubs for devices from all vendors, so consumers aren't locked into just buying Linksys, he said.

Cisco has a strong faith in IEEE 802.11n wireless to deliver video around a home. In fact, it expects wireless to win out over all other types of home networks, partly because so many consumer electronics devices are equipped with wireless technologies. However, Linksys routers do include provisions for incorporating wired technologies such as powerline and coaxial cable.

What allows Cisco to become the center of home networks is the company's expertise in video across service provider, enterprise and home networks, Wingo said. The engineering teams at Linksys and Cisco's enterprise businesses now pass ideas back and forth, he said. It brings intelligence from that experience into the software in Linksys wireless routers, which are more than just routers or access points but video processing devices that can do part of the work of delivering video appropriately to TVs, tablets and other devices, Wingo said.

Some of these intelligent routers will be delivered and managed by service providers. But part of Cisco's strategy involves changing the way consumers buy home networking gear in stores. Routers and other gear are often sold on price, and consumers end up with networks and consumer electronics that don't work well together, Wingo said. The problems can be complex, involving wireless bandwidth, processor performance and broadband speed, but failures often just end in frustration.