IoT to overtake mobile

When talking about IoT, people will referred to the billions of devices that are projected to be connected by the next decade. That can be hard to wrap your head around, so keep two things in mind -- your current data plan and the ubiquity of cell phones, in terms of sheer number; Wikipedia tells us it was around seven billion in 2014.

Today, Mashable is reporting that in five years, it is estimated the average mobile user in the US will use 22GB of data per month -- better lock in that data plan now! Assuming IoT services scale similarly, it's interesting is to anticipate how that would impact bandwidth for connected devices. As the mobile infrastructure scales, I would assume IoT would as well; especially if it is built on top of cellular technology.

And while IoT is a growing market projected to include several billion more devices in the coming years, that's nothing new. But In the linked Ericsson report, not only does it agree with that projections, anywhere from 16 to 28 billion devices by the early 20s, but also by 2018, we may see IoT devices overtaking mobile devices as the largest category of connected things. 

While IoT traffic probably won't overtake mobile traffic for a while (the majority of mobile traffic is video), with the projected increase in both number of devices and bandwidth, it will be interesting to see what sort of services become available and how current services scale.

IoT, can you hear me now?

Readwrite brings recent news of Sigfox and its plans to provide a low-power, low-bandwidth IoT networking solution built on top of cellar networks. Integrating within an existing infrastructure is a smart move, and funding from some big players definitely helps; from the article:

Sigfox’s network does not require lots of investment to scale.... Samsung, Telefonica, and Intel have invested $150 million into the company...which should give them enough to heavily expand into new countries.

As IoT starts to pick up the pace, Sigfox believes it will see an increase in sales.

Sigfox’s business model appears to target enterprise and industrial users, you won’t use their service to live stream an event, or upload photos. Some stats from their dev page:

  • Up to 12 bytes per message
  • Up to 140 messages per day
  • Six messages per hour

The +/- on this service will likely mirror cellular providers — on the one hand, it’s fantastic to have an option to connect hardware on a world scale; on the other, probably everyone has had at least one negative experience with a cellular provider’s service or contract terms.

This blog tends to focus on developments in data and security, but with the low-bandwidth model of this service, I don’t anticipate a lot of potential to expose personal data. With any smart (exploitable) device on a network, it’s good to proceed after determining 1) the device will benefit from being connected and 2) losing network access to the device for any amount of time won’t be catastrophic.