IoT Has Major Unresolved Challenges Ahead
It’s Still a Tower of Babble Privacy and Security Remain the Thorniest Problems I want…
It’s Still a Tower of Babble Privacy and Security Remain the Thorniest Problems I want…
This post focuses on a particularly important technology market, the Internet of Things. IoT is at a strategic inflection point, due to explosive projected market growth and unresolved problems of wireless data throughput and energy-efficiency needs. The IoT market is projected to grow to 75 Billion devices by 2025. This growth is predicated on very high throughput wireless networks combined with high energy-efficiency which are not yet available. Existing wireless technologies, including 5G, will not meet this market need. Also, the extreme diversity of IoT applications will require both small sensors that operate using minimal energy and bandwidth and virtual reality applications with very high Gigabit per second data rates and substantial power requirements.
Five years ago, I wrote a post on this blog disparaging the state of the Internet of Things/home automation market as a “Tower of Proprietary Babble.” Vendors of many different home and industrial product offerings were literally speaking different languages, making their products inoperable with other complementary products from other vendors. The market was being constrained by its immaturity and a failure to grasp the importance of open standards. A 2017 Verizon report concluded that “an absence of industry-wide standards…represented greater than 50% of executives concerns about IoT. Today I can report that finally, the solutions and technologies are beginning to come together, albeit still slowly.
The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) is being loosely tossed around in the media. But…
It has dawned on me that an entirely new Mega Multidimensional War of Titans is developing, entirely separate and distinct from the mobile smartphone Multidimensional Mega War of Titans. In many ways this new industry war may be more strategic, larger and more valuable than the smart phone war. The emerging new battleground is the Mega Global War of the Internet of Everything. The global players in this newly developing war are well known names in high technology: ARM, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Intel, and Qualcomm, not to mention a new class of players like The Zigbee Alliance, Honeywell and a host of others. A number of small Canadian companies are also in the thick of this.
The term “Internet of Things” is being loosely tossed around in the media. But what does it mean? It means simply that data communication like the Internet, but not necessarily Internet Protocol packets is emerging for all manner of “things” in the home: light switches, lighting devices, thermostats, door locks, window shades, kitchen appliances, washers & dryers, home audio and video equipment, even pet food dispensers. You get the idea. All of this communication occurs autonomously, without human intervention. The communication can be between and among these devices, so called machine to machine or M2M. The data communication can also terminate in a home compute server where the information can be made available to the homeowner to intervene remotely from their smart mobile phone or any other remote Internet connected device.