IoT is our chance to learn how we can produce much more by consuming less
Written by: Soracom Team
Published: June 28, 2017
We as humans have tendency to over consume and work in an unsustainable manner for short term and personal gains. I see the Internet of Things as our chance to learn how to produce much more by consuming a lot less as compared to today.
We talk proudly about looking for life on other planets. Let’s first learn to grow, build and innovate using our resources in a sustainable way.
Do we want a connected world that further drains the planet’s resources OR sustainable connected world that future of humanity relies upon?
Massive explosion of the IoT industry may lead us to a collective success or a collective failure. Any other way would be a short term gain for few people or companies without a big picture of a sustainable connected world.
The more devices are connected, the easier it is to cause catastrophes. Over 6 billion devices are connected already today. I hope you get the picture.
More than ever before, it is expected from IoT innovators to deliver new services. Very soon there will be over 10 billion of connected devices. The amount of power consumption by all IoT devices is equal to power used by some major cities. If all those devices would send only the relevant sensing data with minimal processing on device side, we could save at least up to 25% of energy consumption. Those savings in larger context are already enough to power a big city like Hamburg or Paris.
Next to sustainability stands security. IoT devices measure and transmit sensitive data. This data should not be exchanged on public internet. Do you, as consumer, want your security camera, vessel tracking system, heart rate monitor, smart home or connected oven to be connected on the public internet and hacked during next DDoS, Dyn or X-attack?
All communication should be secured (between device & cloud). The key feature when building IoT use-cases or selecting connectivity provider should be a private IoT network including bi-directional communication by-passing public internet.
Scalability. When you are ready to scale, you don’t want anything to slow you down. IoT innovators need the same interface across numerous IoT technology network providers (like cellular, LoRa, Sigfox, satellite, etc) in different countries, avoiding the hassle of SIM settings customization for each country.
To manage easily millions or billions of devices, powerful SIM management with eternity of “if/or logics” is a tool IoT innovators will die without. “Send me a message if my device leaves the country or SIM changes device; if my data limit is exceeded (keep control on the budget)” and many more detailed operations in real time. Just make your own selection of the features needed and use your own interface.
Most of the core networks that are being used for IoT connectivity were never meant for it. To achieve collective success connectivity solutions should be designed, developed and deployed for IoT.
I wish all IoT innovators the best of luck while looking for affordable and sustainable solutions.
