Tag: IoT

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The Industry

How Many IoT Devices Do You Have?

Before reading any further, make a quick guess of the number of Internet of Thing (IoT) devices you have in your house. That’s any device that can make a wireless connection through cellular, WiFi, or bluetooth. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ting Internet recently conducted a survey of 1,500 people and asked them how many Internet-enabled devices they have in their home. The average respondent quickly estimated that they had eight IoT devices in their home.

Now, make a count of all of the devices. Following is a list of the kinds of devices you might have that can connect with wireless:

  • Computer, laptops, tablets, and cellphones
  • eReaders like the Amazon Kindle
  • Smart TVs
  • Smart watches
  • Gaming consoles
  • Smart speakers
  • Smart headphones
  • Smart assistants like the Amazon Echo
  • Smart thermostats (ones that you can control from a cellphone or computer)
  • Security and front porch cameras
  • Smart door locks
  • Alarms that you can control remotely for burglar, smoke, CO2, radon, and flood alarms
  • Smart appliances you can control from an app such as washers, dryers, refrigerators, coffee makers
  • Smart exercise monitors and smart gym equipment
  • Smart medical devices like blood pressure monitors, sleep monitors, and thermometers
  • Smart lights
  • Smart blinds
  • Smart irrigation and watering systems
  • Smart toys, robots, and gadgets
  • Your car – if you can start it from your phone

Respondents generally undercounted. Instead of the eight devices they thought they had, after going through the list the average count grew to thirteen.

I tried this and my quick guess was sixteen and my wife guessed twenty-six. After sitting with my wife and counting we came up with thirty-three devices. There were devices on the final list that surprised me. I learned we can control our basement dehumidifier with WiFi. We have two inexpensive thermometers that allow us to record our temperatures in an app every time we use them. We had both forgotten about the ability to start the car remotely. The number of wired devices would have been higher, but we recently undertook a spring cleaning and ditched and donated a few smart devices. And after we did the count, our daughter came home for the summer and brought eleven more devices.

Ting found a few more interesting things in the survey. Adults between 35 and 54 had the highest number of connected devices. They also were the group that undercounted the number of devices by the biggest percentage.

Ting’s survey found the most commonly owned devices are smartphones (96%), computer/laptop (86%), tablet (70%), smart TV (69%), gaming console (62%), streaming device (49%), smart speaker (42%) and smartwatch (31%).

Ting’s survey results were lower than I’ve seen from other surveys that I’ve covered in a blog. Deloitte found in a survey in 2022 that the average home has 22 smart devices. But the bottom line is that wireless capability is being included in a huge array of everyday devices. Our homes are becoming increasingly connected.

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Technology The Industry

Matter – The New IoT Standard

Anybody that uses more than one brand of Internet of Things (IoT) device in the home understands that there is no standard way to connect to these devices. Each manufacturer chooses from a range of different protocols to communicate with and control its devices, such as BLE, LoRa, LTE-M, NB-IoT, SigFox, ZigBee, and others. Every family of devices, and typically every different brand requires a separate app on your smartphone, which means managing a pile of different apps, passwords, and logs-ins to control your devices.

The situation is tougher on businesses. Consider a farmer that might need a dozen sets of software to control the different smart devices and systems installed in a modern dairy or chicken farm. Farmers have complained to me that it’s been growing increasingly complex to manage the electronics in their operation from day to day. Not only must they master different systems to control each set of devices, but the outputs of the various systems are not in a compatible format to communicate with other systems. A farmer must manually intervene if an alarm from one set of devices needs a response from other devices.

This is a big problem also for larger businesses that deploy IoT devices. It’s not uncommon for the makers of smart devices to retool their products over time, and a large business might find over time that it has multiple generations of smoke alarms, security cameras, smart door locks, or other devices from the same manufacturer that each require a different set of software to control. Companies have sometimes resorted to ripping and replacing older but still functional devices that are incompatible with the newest generation of devices.

Big companies also have the same problems as farmers in that there is no easy way to tie devices together onto one platform. The benefit of using smart sensors loses a lot of appeal if people are needed to manually interpret and intervene when trying to coordinate alarms or other events. Some companies have spent a lot of money to develop unique software to make sense of the outputs of different kinds of smart sensors – but that software has to constantly be tweaked for new devices.

The manufacturers of smart devices recognized that the chaos in the industry is holding down sales. Amazon, Apple, Google, and more than 200 other makers of home electronics and smart devices got together to develop a common IoT platform. These manufacturers agreed that it is important for them to work together, even though they are market rivals because the confusion created by the multiple communications platforms for IoT devices is hurting sales for the industry as a whole.

The new IoT platform that addresses the problems of the industry has been named Matter. There were hundreds of new devices using Matter at this years CES from a variety of vendors. Matter has created a standard language for interpreting the outputs from IoT devices. This means that the commands to operate a smart door lock will be identical from every manufacturer of smart door locks that joins the Matter consortium.  Matter also tests and certifies that devices adhere to the new standard.

This has huge potential for users of IoT. It will be possible to have one app on a smartphone that can communicate with all Matter-enabled devices in the home. This will make it easy and almost instantaneous to connect a new Matter device into your home network of devices. It also will make it easier to coordinate interactions between devices. For example, let’s say that you want your smart blinds to be lowered any time the inside temperature rises to some predetermined level. That can be made to work even if your smart thermostat and smart blinds equipment come from different vendors – commands will be unified across Matter devices, regardless of who made them. The implications for the farmer and the businesses are even more profound. They might finally be able to have a suite of interactive smart devices instead of disparate devices that can’t communicate with each other.

Interestingly, there were folks calling for this from the beginning of the IoT industry. But vendors all chose to take separate paths, and some competitors chose a different path so they wouldn’t be compatible with anything else. In the early days, manufacturers had a vision that people would buy a whole integrated suite of products from them – but the industry didn’t go in that direction. If this catches on, vendors that use Matter ought to have a major advantage within a few years of anybody that refuses to use the new standard.

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Technology The Industry

The Next Big Thing

I’ve always been somewhat amused to read about the colossally important technology trends that are right around the corner. These trends are mostly driven by the wishful thinking of vendors, and they have rarely come true, at least to the extent that is predicted. Even when the next big thing comes to pass, it’s almost never at the predicted magnitude. There has been at least one of these big trends announced every year, and here are a few of the more interesting ones.

I can remember when it was announced that we would be living in an Internet of Things world. Not only would our houses be stuffed full of labor-savings IOT devices, but our fields, forests, and even the air around us would be full of small sensors that would give us feedback on the world around us. The reality was not the revolution predicted by the industry press, but over a decade, most of us now have smart devices in our homes. But the fields, forests, and surrounding environment – not so much.

The IOT trend was followed by big pronouncements that we’d all be adopting wearables. This was not only devices like Google Glass, but we’d all have wearables built into our everyday clothes so that we could effortlessly carry a computer and sensors with us everywhere. This prediction was about as big of a flop as imaginable. Google Glass crashed and burned when the public made it clear that nobody wanted everyday events to be live streamed. Other than gimmicks at CES, there was no real attempt at smart clothes.

But wearables weren’t the biggest flop of all – that is reserved in my mind for 5G. The hype for 5G swamps the hype for all of the other big trends combined. 5G was going to transform the world. We’d have near gigabit speeds everywhere, and wireless was going to negate the need for investing in fiber broadband networks. 5G was going to enable fleets of driverless cars. 5G would drive latency so low that it was going to be the preferred method for connection by gamers and stock traders. There was going to be 5G small cell sites on every corner, and fast wireless broadband would be everywhere. Instead of 5G, we got a watered-down version of 4G LTE labeled as 5G. Admittedly, cellular broadband speeds are way faster, but none of the predicted revolution came to pass.

A few predictions came to pass largely as touted – although at a much slower pace. Five years ago, we were told that everything was going to migrate to the cloud. Big corporations were going to quickly ditch internal computing, and within a short time, the cloud would transform computing. It didn’t happen as quickly as predicted, but we have moved a huge amount of our computing lives into the cloud. Tasks like gaming, banking, and most of the apps we’ve come to rely on are in the cloud today. The average person doesn’t realize the extent that they rely on the cloud until they lose broadband and realize how little of the things they do are stored in the computers at their homes and offices.

This blog was prompted by the latest big trend. The press is full of stories about how computing is moving back to the edge. In case the irony of that escapes you, this largely means undoing a lot of the big benefits of going to the cloud. There are some good reasons for this shift. For example, the daily news about hacking has corporations wondering if data will be safer locally than in the cloud. But the most important reason cited for the movement to edge computing is that the world is looking for extremely low latency – and this can only come when computer processing is done locally. The trouble with this prediction is that it’s hard to find applications that absolutely must have a latency of less than 10 milliseconds. I’m sure there are some, but not enough to make this into the next big trend. I could be wrong, but history would predict that this will happen to a much smaller degree than being touted by vendors.

All big technology trends have one big weakness in common – the fact that the world naturally resists change. Even when the next big thing has clear advantages, there must be an overwhelming reason for companies and people to drop everything to immediately adopt something new, and that usually is untested in the market. Most businesses have learned that being an early adapter is risky – a new technology can bring a market edge, but it can also result in having egg on one’s face.

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The Industry

Amazon’s Huge IoT Network

In a recent blog post, Amazon invited developers to test drive its gigantic IoT network. This network has been labeled as Sidewalk and was created by tying together all of Amazon’s wireless devices like Amazon Echos and Ring cameras.

Amazon claims this huge wireless network now covers 90% of U.S. households. Amazon created the network by transmitting Bluetooth and 900 MHz LoRa signals from its various devices. This network provides a benefit to Amazon because it can detect and track its own devices separate from anything a homeowner might do with WiFi.

But Amazon has intended for years to monetize this network, and this announcement begins that process. This network has been under-the-radar until now, and most homeowners have no idea that their Amazon devices can connect and communicate with other devices outside the home. Amazon swears that the IoT connection between devices is separate from anything happening inside the house using WiFi – that the IoT network is a fully separate network.

Anyplace where there are more than a few Amazon devices, the network should be robust. The 900 MHz spectrum adds a lot of distance to the signals, and it’s a frequency that does a good job of penetrating obstacles like homes and trees.

Amazon believes that this network can be used by IoT device makers to improve the performance of IoT devices in a neighborhood – things like smart thermostats, appliance sensors, and smart door locks. Such devices use only a small amount of bandwidth but are reliant on the home broadband network being operational to work. Amazon’s vision with this network is that your smart door lock will still work even when your home WiFi isn’t working.

By making the network available to others, Amazon can unleash developers to create new types of wireless devices. For example, it’s always been a challenge to use outdoor sensors since WiFi signals outside of homes is weak and inconsistent. It’s not hard to imagine a whole new array of sensors enabled by the Sidewalk network. Picture a motion detector on a shed door or a leak detector on outdoor faucets. With this network, vendors can now manufacture such devices with the knowledge that most homes will be able to make the needed wireless connection.

This also holds a lot of promise for municipal and business sensors. This is a low-cost way to communicate with smart city or other sensors. This would enable, for the first time, the deployment of environment sensors anywhere within range of the Sidewalk network.

This is another interesting venture by Amazon. At least in the U.S., this is a lower-cost solution than trying to connect to IoT devices by satellite. The only cost of building this network for Amazon was adding the wireless capability to its devices – mere pennies when deployed across millions of devices. But interestingly, Amazon will also have a satellite network starting in 2025 that can fill in the gaps where the Sidewalk network can’t reach.

Amazon says that it has already made deals to test the network with companies like Netvox, OnAsset, and Primax. Now that manufacturers know this network exists and is available, this ought to open up a wide range of new IoT devices that are not reliant only on WiFi. This might finally be the network that enables the original promise of IoT of a world with sensors everywhere, keeping tabs on the environment around us.

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The Industry

Is Your Home Listening to You?

When I was a teenager, science fiction books envisioned a future where people talked to their home to take care of mundane tasks. For somebody willing to spend the money on new appliances and devices that future is here today.

Just consider the Amazon Alexa voice assistant, which is installed in the largest number of devices. GE has built Alexa into its new stoves, refrigerators, wall ovens, dishwashers, washers and dryers, and air conditioners. Samsung has built Alexa into refrigerators, washers, dryers, air conditioners, and vacuums. Alexa is built into smart light bulbs, smart wall plugs, televisions, thermostats, smart door locks, security cameras, speakers, and numerous other devices. The chips and/or software to add Alexa to devices are getting cheap and it shouldn’t be long until the app is built into most electronics you might buy.

The convenience of talking to home devices is not without a cost, and companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google are listening to you through the devices. Like other voice assistants, Alexa listens all of the time waiting for a ‘wake word’ that activates the app. There are major privacy and security concerns related to the constant listening. We have to trust the company controlling the device not to listen to us all of the time because there is nothing stopping them from doing so.

Amazon swears they don’t listen or record except for a short period of time after the wake word is spoken. They also swear that they only preserve those recordings in an effort to improve Alexa’s responses to questions. If you are going to use Alexa in your home, you are trusting that Amazon is telling the truth. Back in 2017 Samsung got a huge black eye when they were unable to make that promise concerning their smart TVs.

The other big concern is hacking. There is zero chance that all of the companies making devices that include a voice assistant have iron-clad security. While Amazon really might not be listening to you, a hacker will surely be willing to do so.

To make matters even more uncomfortable, a lot of lawyers and privacy experts believe that if a person knowingly installs a device that listens and transmits information to a third party, that person has waived their Fourth Amendment privacy rights and any rights granted by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The concept has not yet been challenged in a court, but if it’s true, then people have no recourse against Amazon or anybody else using the information gathered from a voice assistant device.

My house has four Amazon Echos that we bought when the devices first hit the market. They are convenient and I use them to listen to music, check the weather or news, check the hours at stores or restaurants, and to make the occasional reminder in the middle of the night. My family has gotten uncomfortable with being listened to all of the time and we now unplug the devices when we aren’t using them. This kills all of the spontaneous uses of the devices, but for now, that feels safer than being listened to.

I’m going to be leery about buying any new household appliance that can listen to me. If I can’t disable the listening function, I’m not going to buy the device. It’s impossible to feel secure with these devices right now. It’s impossible to take the word of big company that such devices are safe. You only have to look at the current experiences with the hacking of Ring cameras to know that smart home devices are currently anything but safe.

Small ISPs have never worried much about the devices that people hang off their networks. ISPs provide the bandwidth pipe, and how people use data has not been a concern for the ISP. However, that is slowly changing. I have a lot of clients that are now offering smart thermostats, smart security systems, and other smart devices as a way to boost revenue. ISPs need to be careful of any claims they make to customers. Somebody advertising safety for a smart security system might have liability if that system is hacked and the customer exploited.

Maybe I’m being overly cautious, but the idea of somebody I don’t know being able to listen to everything said in my house makes me uncomfortable. As an industry person who has been following the history of IoT devices, I’m even more uncomfortable since it’s now obvious that most smart home devices have lousy security. If you don’t think Amazon is listening to you, I challenge you to activate Alexa and say something vile about Jeff Bezos, then see how much longer it takes to get your next Amazon shipment. Go ahead, I dare you!

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Regulation - What is it Good For? Technology

We Need Public 5G Spectrum

Last October the FCC issued a Notice for Proposed Rulemaking that proposed expanding WiFi into the 6 GHz band of spectrum (5.925 to 7.125 GHz). WiFi has been a huge economic boon to the country and the FCC recognizes that providing more free public spectrum is a vital piece of the spectrum puzzle. Entrepreneurs have found a myriad of inventive ways to use WiFi that go far beyond what carriers have provided with licensed spectrum.

In much of the country the 6 GHz spectrum is likely to be limited to indoor usage due to possible outdoor interference with Broadcast Auxiliary Service, where remote crews transmit news feeds to radio and TV stations, and Cable Television Relay Service, which cable companies used to transmit data within a cable company. The biggest future needs for WiFi are going to be indoors, so restricting this spectrum to indoor use doesn’t feel like an unreasonable limitation.

However, WiFi has some inherent limitations. The biggest problem with the WiFi standard is that a WiFi network will pause to allow any user to use the bandwidth. In a crowded environment with a lot of devices the constant pausing adds latency and delay in the system, and in heavy-use environments like a business hotel the constant pauses can nearly shut down a WiFi network. Most of us don’t feel that interference today inside our homes, but as we add more and more devices over time, we will recognize the inherent WiFi interference into our network. The place where WiFi interference is already a big concern is in heavy wireless environments like hospitals, factories, airports, business hotels, and convention centers.

Many of our future computing needs are going to require low latency. For instance, creating home holograms from multiple transmitters is going to require timely delivery of packets to each transmitter. Using augmented reality to assist in surgery will require deliver of images in real time. WiFi promises to get better with the introduction of WiFi 6 using the 802.11ax standard, but that new standard does not eliminate the innate limitations of WiFi.

The good news is that we already have a new wireless standard that can create a low-latency dedicated signal paths to users. Fully implemented 5G with frequency slicing can be used to satisfy those situations where WiFi doesn’t meet the need. It’s not hard to picture a future indoor network where a single router can satisfy some user needs using the WiFi standard with other uses satisfied using 5G – the router will choose the best standard to use for a given need.

To some degrees the cellular carriers have this same vision. They talk of 5G being used to take over IoT needs instead of WiFi. They talk about using 5G for low latency uses like augmented reality. But when comparing the history of the cellular networks and WiFi it’s clear that WiFi has been used far more creatively. There are thousands of vendors working in today’s limited WiFi spectrum that have developed a wide array of wireless services. Comparatively, the cellular carriers have been quite vanilla in their use of cellular networks to deliver voice and data.

I have no doubt that AT&T and Verizon have plans to offer million-dollar 5G solutions for smart factories, hospitals, airports and other busy wireless environments. But in doing so they will tap only a tiny fraction of the capability of 5G. If we want 5G to actually meet the high expectations that the industry has established, we ought to create a public swath of spectrum that can use 5G. The FCC could easily empower the use of the 6 GHz spectrum for both WiFi and 5G, and in doing so would unleash wireless entrepreneurs to come up with technologies that haven’t even been imagined.

The current vision of the cellular carriers is to somehow charge everybody a monthly subscription to use 5G – and there will be enough devices using the spectrum that most people will eventually give in and buy the subscription. However, the big carriers are not going to be particularly creative, and instead are likely to be very restrictive on how we use 5G.

The alternate vision is to set aside a decent slice of public spectrum for indoor use of 5G. The public will gain use of the spectrum by buying a 5G router, with no monthly subscription fee – because it’s using public spectrum. After all, 5G is a just standard, developed worldwide and is not the proprietary property of the big cellular companies. Entrepreneurs will jump on the opportunity to develop great uses for the spectrum and the 5G standard. Rather than being held captive by the limited vision of AT&T and Verizon we’d see huge number of devices using 5G creatively. This could truly unleash things like augmented reality and virtual presence. Specialty vendors would develop applications that make great strides in hospital health care. We’d finally see smart shopping holograms in stores.

The public probably doesn’t understand that the FCC has complete authority over how each swath of spectrum is used. Only the FCC can determine which spectrum can or cannot be used for WiFi, 5G and other standards. The choice ought to be an easy one. The FCC can let a handful of cellular companies decide how society will use 5G or they can unleash the creativity of thousands of developers to come up with a myriad of 5G applications. We know that creating public spectrum creates immense societal and economic good. If the FCC hadn’t set aside public spectrum for WiFi we’d all still have wires to all our home broadband devices and many of the things we now take for granted would never have come to pass.

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The Industry

5G and Home IoT

I’ve been asked a lot recently about the potential future of 5G – everybody in the industry wants to understand the potential threat from 5G. One of the biggest proposed uses for 5G is to connect IoT devices to the cloud. Today I’m going to look at what that might mean.

It’s clear that 5G cellular will be the choice for connecting to outdoor IoT sensors. Sensors for farm equipment in rural areas or for outdoor weather and traffic sensors in urban areas are going to most easily handled by 5G cellular since the technology will eventually be everywhere. 5G is particularly suited for serving IoT devices due to frequency slicing where just the right amount of bandwidth, large or small, can be allocated to each small outdoor sensor. 5G has another interesting feature that will allow it to poll sensors on a pre-set schedule rather than have the sensor constantly trying to constantly connect – which will reduce power consumption at the sensor.

It’s clear that the cellular carriers also have their eye on indoor IoT devices. It’s harder to say that 5G will win this battle because today almost all indoor devices are connected using WiFi.

There are a couple of different 5G applications that might work in the indoor environment. The cellular carriers are going to make a pitch to be the technology of choice to connect small inside devices. In my home I can get a good cellular signal everywhere except in the old underground basement. There is no question that cellular signal from outside the home could be used to connect to many of the smaller bandwidth applications within the home. I can’t see any technical reason that devices like my Amazon Echo or smart appliances couldn’t connect to 5G instead of WiFi.

But 5G cellular has a number of hurdles issues to overcome to break into this market. I’m always going to have a wired broadband connection to my home, and as long as that connection comes from somebody other than one of the big cellular carriers I’m not going to want to use 5G if that means paying for another monthly subscription to a cellular provider. I’d much rather have my inside devices connected to the current broadband connection. I also want all of my devices on the same network for easy management. I want to use one hub to control smart light switches or other devices and want everything on the same wireless network. That means I don’t want some devices on WiFi and others on cellular.

One of the sales pitches for 5G is that it will be able to easily accommodate large numbers of IoT connections. Looking into the future there might come a time when there are a hundred or more smart devices in the house. It’s not that hard to picture the Jetson’s house where window shades change automatically to collect or block sunlight, where music plays automatically when I enter a room, where my coffee is automatically ready for me when I get out of bed in the morning. These things can be done today with a lot of effort, but with enough smart devices in a home these functions will probably eventually become mainstream.

One of the limitations of WiFi today is that it degrades in a busy environment. A WiFi network pauses each time it gets a new request for a connection, which is the primary reason it’s so hard to keep a good connection in a busy hotel or convention center.

However, the next generation with WiFi 6 is already anticipating these needs in the home. WiFi can adopt the same frequency slicing used by 5G so that only a small portion of a channel can be used to connect to a given device. Events can be scheduled on WiFi so that the network only polls certain sensors only periodically. The WiFi network might only interact with the smart coffee pot or the smart window shades when something needs to be done, rather than maintaining a constantly open channel. It’s likely that the next iterations of WiFi will become nearly as good as 5G for these functions within a closed home environment.

There is an even better solution that is also being discussed. There’s no reason that indoor routers can’t be built that use both WiFi and 5G frequencies. While the cellular companies are gobbling up millimeter wave spectrum, as long as there is an unlicensed slice of spectrum set aside for public use it will be possible to deploy both WiFi on mid-range frequencies and 5G on millimeter wave frequencies at the same time. This would blend the benefits of both technologies. It might mean using WiFi to control the smart coffee pot and indoor 5G to connect to the smart TV.

Unfortunately for the cellular carriers, these duel-function routers won’t need them. The same companies that make WiFi routers today can make combination 5G / WiFi routers that work with the full range of unlicensed spectrum – meaning no revenue opportunity for the cellular carriers. When I look at all of the issues I have a hard time seeing 5G cellular becoming a preferred technology within the home.

 

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Technology

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

There is a lot of talk around the world among academics and futurists that we have now entered into the beginnings of the fourth industrial revolution. The term industrial revolution is defined as a rapid change in the economy due to technology.

The first industrial revolution came from steam power that drove the creation of the first large factories to create textiles and other goods. The second industrial revolution is called the age of science and mass production and was powered by the simultaneous development of electricity and oil-powered combustion engines. The third industrial revolution was fairly recent and was the rise of digital technology and computers.

There are differing ideas of what the fourth industrial revolution means, but every prediction involves using big data and emerging technologies to transform manufacturing and the workplace. The fourth industrial revolution means mastering and integrating an array of new technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, IoT, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and quantum computing. Some technologists are already predicting that the shorthand description for this will be the age of robotics.

Each of these new technologies is in their infancy but all are progressing rapidly. Take the most esoteric technology on the list – quantum computing. As recently as three or four years ago this was mostly an academic concept and we now have first generation quantum computers. I can’t recall where I read it, but I remember a quote that said that if we think of the fourth industrial revolution in terms of a 1,000-day process that we are now only on day three.

The real power of the fourth industrial revolution will come from integrating the technologies. The technology that is the most advanced today is robotics, but robotics will change drastically when robots can process huge amounts of data quickly and can use AI and machine learning to learn and cope with the environment in real time. Robotics will be further enhanced in a factory or farm setting by integrating a wide array of sensors to provide feedback from the surrounding environment.

I’m writing about this because all of these technologies will require the real-time transfer of huge amounts of data. Futurists and academics who talk about the fourth industrial revolution seem to assume that the needed telecon technologies already exist – but they don’t exist today and need to be developed in conjunction with the other new technologies.

The first missing element to enable the other technologies are computer chips that can process huge amounts of data in real time. Current chip technology has a built-in choke point where data is queued and fed into and out of a chip for processing. Scientists are exploring a number of ways to move data faster. For example, light-based computing has the promise to move data at speeds up to 50 Gbps. But even that’s not fast enough and there is research being done using lasers to beam data directly into the chip processor – a process that might increase processing speeds 1,000 times over current chips.

The next missing communications element is a broadband technology that can move data fast enough to keep up with the faster chips. While fiber can be blazingly fast, a fiber is far too large to use at the chip level, and so data has to be converted at some point from fiber to some other transmission path.

The amount of data that will have to be passed in some future applications is immense. I’ve already seen academics bemoaning that millimeter wave radios are not fast enough, so 5G will not provide the solution. Earlier this year the first worldwide meeting was held to officially start collaborating on 6G technology using terabit wave spectrum. Transmissions at those super-high frequencies only stay coherent for a few feet, but these frequencies can carry huge amounts of data. It’s likely that 6G will play a big role in providing the bandwidth to the robots and other big data needs of the fourth industrial revolution. From the standpoint of the telecom industry, we’re no longer talking about last-mile and we are starting to address the last-foot!

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The Industry

An IoT Bill of Rights

Parks Associates recently released a report saying that the average broadband home now has 10 connected IoT devices. This includes desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones but also today includes a wide arrange of other devices such as smart TVs, smart speakers and a wide range of smart home devices.

I remember back in 2013 when IoT was first being discussed that there was a lot of talk about creating an IoT Bill of Rights that would define the ethics that ought to be required for any smart device placed into people’s homes. The discussion then was that the benefits of smart devices could be outweighed by the harm that could come from IoT manufacturers secretly spying on us and collecting and selling personal data. There was also a lot of concern that IoT devices could provide entry points for hackers into home networks. That discussion largely died, and here we are six years later introducing IoT devices into our homes without any policies or standards defining the rights of smart device users or the obligations of manufacturers to protect privacy.

There were numerous concerns voiced in 2013 that are still valid concerns today, and unfortunately, are issues that most buyers of smart devices don’t think about:

Software Updates. We are used to routinely getting security patches and other software updates for our laptops and smartphone to keep us safe. However, few smart devices come with any mechanism for updates and over time become more vulnerable to hacking. You’ve probably heard the story of the casino that got hacked through a connection into a smart water pump in a fish tank. Hackers used that unprotected connection to gain access to the casino network. There ought to be a requirement that IoT software and firmware is somehow updated, and that would include figuring out how to deal with cases where a device manufacturer goes out of business for some reason. Unfortunately, most of our smart devices are never updated after we buy them.

Full Disclosure. There have been well-publicized cases where the public found out that IoT devices were listening in without their knowledge. There were big headlines when it was revealed that Samsung TVs could both listen and see into the living room. Parents panicked when it was revealed that Cayla dolls were listening to kids and sending conversations to unspecified data center. It’s nearly impossible today to know if a smart device includes a hidden microphone or camera since those devices are so small. Sellers of IoT devices should be required to clearly disclose when devices can watch or listen to buyers. There also should be required to provide clear instructions on how to disable unwanted surveillance.

The Sharing and Sale of IoT Data. Sellers of IoT devices ought to be required before purchase to provide full disclosure on what they do with data they collect from users. And these disclosures should be prominent and not buried in a fine print legalese terms of service document.  I read late last year that as many as 1,500 data points are now gathered on the average connected adult every day. A lot of these comes from location data on our smartphones, but much of it also comes from IoT devices in the home. Manufacturers that violate privacy promises given to customers should be fined heavily.

Data Retention. IoT device manufacturers also ought to disclose how long they keep our data. It’s always an eye-opener to do a Google search on yourself and see things from fifteen and twenty years ago. At the early stage of search engines there was talk about having non-headline data purged after six months – that obviously never happened. We are just now seeing large companies figure out how to make sense out of mountains of data. It’s dismaying to think that years of old data about us, that was probably never used, can be sold to create personal profiles on each of us.

User Control of Devices. In a perfect world, the user would have complete control over the IoT devices in the home. We ought to be able to decide what data is and is not shared. We ought to be to disable surveillance. We ought to be able to encrypt and store data locally that we want to use for ourselves.

We’ve come a long way with IoT since 2013. Then there were a handful of IoT devices like the Nest smart thermostat. If you believe the Parks Associates numbers most of us have brought numerous smart devices into our homes. I’m personally going to bet the Parks number of ten devices is low because many of us own devices that are capable of connecting to our WiFi that we don’t even think about.

We’re allowing all of these devices in our homes without full disclosure from the manufacturers, with no mechanism for keeping device security up-to-date, and with no idea what data is collected on us and how it’s being used.

As consumers we ought to be able to trust that the manufactures of IoT devices are protecting our data and privacy. It’s more likely though that many IoT device makers are hoping to monetize our data, and there’s no part of the government that I’m aware of that is working on the side of the consumer for these issues. We need an IoT bill or rights a lot more now than we did in 2013.

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Private 5G Networks

One of the emerging uses for 5G is to create private 5G cellular networks for large businesses. The best candidates for 5G technology are businesses that need to connect and control a lot of devices or those that need the low latency promised by the 5G standards. This might include businesses like robotized factories, chemical plants, busy shipping ports and airports.

5G has some advantages over other technologies like WiFi, 4G LTE and Ethernet that makes it ideal for communications rich environments. Cellular network can replace the costly and bulky hard-wired networks needed for Ethernet. It’s not practical to wire an Ethernet network to the hordes of tiny IoT sensors that are needed to operate a modern manufacturing factory. It’s also not practical to have a hard-wired network in a dynamic environment where equipment needs to be moved for various purposes.

5G holds a number of advantages over WiFi and 4G. Frequency slicing means that just the right amount of bandwidth can be delivered to every device in the factory, from the smallest sensor to devices that must upload or download large amounts of data. The 5G standard also allows for setting priorities by device so that mission critical devices always get priority over background devices. The low latency on 5G means that there can be real time coordination and feedback between devices when that’s needed for time-critical manufacturing devices. 5G also offers the ability to communicate simultaneously with a huge number of devices, something that is not practical or possible with WiFi or LTE.

Any discussion of IoT in the past has generally evoked discussion of factories with huge number of tiny sensors that monitor and control every aspect of the manufacturing process. While there have been big strides in developing robotized factories, that concept of a concentrated communications mesh to control the factories has not been possible until the 5G standard.

We are a few years away from having 5G networks that can deliver on all of the promised benefits of the standard. The big telecom manufacturers like Ericsson, Huawei, Qualcomm and Nokia along with numerous smaller companies are working on perfecting the technology and the devices that will support advanced IoT networks.

I read that an Audi plant in Germany is already experimenting with a private cellular network to control the robots that glue car components together. Its robot networks were hard-wired and were not providing fast enough feedback to the robots for the needed precision of the tasks. The company says it’s pleased with the performance so far. However, that test was not yet real 5G and any real use of 5G in factories is still a few years off as manufacturers perfect the wireless technology and perfect the sensor networks.

Probably the biggest challenge in the US will be finding the spectrum to make this work. In the US most of the spectrum that is best suited to operating a 5G factory are sold in huge geographic footprints and the spectrum will be owned by the typical large spectrum holders. Large factory owners might agree to lease spectrum from the large carriers, but they are not going to want those carriers to insert themselves into the design or operation of these complex networks.

In Europe there are already discussions at the various regulatory bodies on possibly setting aside spectrum for factories and other large private users. However, in this country to do so means opening the door to allowing the spectrum to be sold for smaller footprints – something the large wireless carriers would surely challenge. It would be somewhat ironic if the US takes the lead in developing 5G technology but then can’t make it work in factories due to our spectrum allocation policies.

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