Internet of Things: How Real Is It?
Sep 18, 2013
If you’ve been in the networking business as long as I have, you’ve seen terms come and go. For over a decade, each next year was going to be ‘the year of the LAN’. Until it finally was. “ISDN” was always on the verge of being huge, but never made it over the hump. Now the networking community is faced with another major development: the “Internet of Things” (IoT). So two questions:
1) How real is the IoT, and
2) Is the networking industry ready for it?
30 billion connected devices by 2020
Taking each in turn, my answers are: 1) very and 2) not very. On the first point, regardless of what you call it, we’re facing an onslaught of new devices and objects that are increasingly “intelligent” and connected and that provide information that needs to be aggregated, analyzed and acted upon. Forget talking blenders; cameras, sensors and a wide variety of transportation and industrial devices—many of them mobile—are being deployed at an increasingly rapid rate. According to ABI Research, there will be 30 billion connected devices by 2020. These are the ‘things’ that the Internet of Things is made of, and they’re only going to increase, both in number and complexity.
The “last mile” of private and secure wireless networking technology
New enabling technologies like NFC (near field communications) and RFID (radio frequency identification) are much talked-about components that are necessary for connected devices to communicate their vital information. But what about the network to transport that data? How does the information get gathered and transported for analysis and insight?
At Firetide, we believe that the world of connected “things” that are now both smart and increasingly mobile, will require a network infrastructure that is flexible, resilient and reliable. We view it as that last-mile of wireless connectivity. And the last-mile needs to be high performance, flexible, secure and resilient. For IoT to become a reality, wireless technology – whether that’s for a smart grid, a factory floor or a smart home – is essential and without it the IoT will never take off.