SK Telecom’s IoT strategy looks beyond Connected Devices

Over the summer, Korea’s SK Telecom outlined its strategy to capitalize on the IoT opportunity. From a networking standpoint, SK Telecom has invested in a nationwide LoRa network. It plans to offer a hybrid offering in parallel with LTE-M over its conventional mobile network. This combination allows SK Telecom to span a wider spectrum of coverage and cost-structure alternatives. Its technology choices use licensed and unlicensed spectrum, support differing data-rates, and, offer a broad range of embedded module costs to deal with barriers to adoption in low price-point (or low perceived value) devices.

IoT Reference Design Framework

The IoT industry seems deeply preoccupied over ideas for IoT reference architectures, cloud-based platforms and edge computing technologies. However, before solution designers leap to the latest flavor of technology, it is worth stepping back to reflect on the characteristics of an IoT application or, more realistically, a group of interoperable applications and then to translate these into a set of logical requirements.

The next step is to map these logical requirements into a physical architecture, which entails a process of design, performance and cost trade-offs, to select suitable technical solutions. This approach avoids the pitfalls of working back from any given technology and positing it as the solution to all IoT problems.

Comparative advantage in IoT standardization

Last year, I wrote a post about the landscape of standards development organizations, industry-alliances and company consortia [1]. Several recent developments have led me to revisit the topic. There are signs that the IoT market is maturing. Users and service providers are well beyond the first hurdle of understanding a new capability and set of enabling technologies. And, businesses are exploring the longer-term road map for IoT solutions and the underlying enablers they will need.

Nigel Upton, Worldwide Director and GM IoT/GCP at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HP-E) encapsulated the issue, from a business standpoint, in a recent conference presentation [2]. He advised companies that they could simplify their IoT strategies by using a common platform, a common data model and an IoT standard. It so happens that HP-E chose oneM2M, viewing it as the best supported standard on offer.

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.