Rumble in the IoT Jungle

I recently participated in a debate, hosted by the IEEE Communications Society, about the pros and cons of IoT standardization. My debating counterpart was the North Americas President of SigFox, a company that has so far raised over US$150m. SigFox is in the process of deploying its proprietary networking technology in 18 countries specifically for the purpose of energy-efficient and low-cost IoT applications.

Much of the debate and several of the audience questions focused on the worry about standards proliferation in the IoT market. This creates a confusing picture for business that have to make long-term product development decisions. My observations on the issue of IoT standardization were fourfold.

A tweet to IoT’s low-power, wide-area networking proponents

It’s amazing to think that Twitter recently turned ten years old. This milestone came on the heels of a rumored, CEO-level assessment [1] of whether to relax its longstanding 140-character limit on tweets. Some of the reaction to this development questions how Twitter, a major influencer of condensed, bite-sized communications, could pull the rug from under its core proposition.

There’s a timely lesson in Twitter’s evolution for the rapidly growing band of companies developing low-power, wide-area and small payload IoT applications.

Reality bites for low-power wide-area IoT

A few weeks ago, I commented on a LightReading article [1] on the topic of IoT prospects for wireless operators. I received positive feedback and a few questions about my observations on the revenue drivers that will shape operator strategies over the long run. In essence, I pointed out that wireless operators can grow in three directions and that their individual strategies will be a hybrid of the alternatives.

Readers can digest the full logic of a presentation that oneM2M Partnership Project invited to deliver at a workshop hosted by ETSI [2] in December 2015. In summary, I outlined how operators can grow along three dimensions.

LTE to spur IoT?

A few years ago, it was standard practice to associate M2M with low data rate characteristics that could be served using 2G networks. In fact, there was quite an uproar when some operators started to announce 2G network shut-down plans. Ignoring the economics of operating cellular networks, some industry commentators also talked of retaining a portion of 2G spectrum for M2M devices.

Recently, a representative[1] from Google reiterated the special characteristics (low bandwidth and inexpensive) of IoT applications and the need for a brand new network. Over the past few years, several initiatives have been launched to address the potentially massive, low data and low power requirement segment of the M2M/IoT market; Neul and SigFox are two examples that spring to mind.

It was therefore interesting to hear of a development that has been working its way through the 3GPP standards process. LTE, traditionally associated with high data-rate mobile services, is now being engineered to address M2M/IoT applications. This is not a case of data-intensive video surveillance or digital display applications but the use of LTE in moderate data rate, low cost and long battery life scenarios.