Low Power networks hold the key to IoT

A Guide to Internet of Things Radio Protocols

We’ve reached a key moment in the Internet of Things (IoT). Established communications protocols are being hurriedly adapted to meet the new requirements thrown up by IoT applications, and less-known protocols are on the verge of being swallowed whole by emerging giants.

WiFi and Bluetooth are familiar faces in the consumer electronics market. With nearly every smartphone containing both protocols, they are integral parts of the majority of consumer’s lives in developed economies – and are becoming increasingly important for consumers in emerging markets too.

Much less well-known are the likes of Z-Wave and ZigBee; rival mesh networking protocols that have been quietly competing in the emerging smart home markets, as well as the industrial markets – more so the case for ZigBee.

However, these protocols that are ideally suited for smart homes thanks to their low power consumption, but arrived on the scene well-ahead of any substantial demand for the smart home as a product or service – as the hardware was simply too expensive to exist as mass-market products. We are now standing at the tipping point where the smart home and its dozens or hundreds of connected devices will quickly become a mainstream offering – and both ZigBee and Z-Wave are threatened by the emergence of a new rival.

Thread is a low-power mesh network that is being promoted by Nest, the smart thermostat company that Google acquired back in January 2014 for $3.2bn. Nest went on to buy Dropcam ($555m, June 2014), for its IP security and home monitoring cameras, and Revolv’s 7-radio home hub (undisclosed price, October 2014), to substantially flesh-out what is a solid foundation for a complete smart home package.

Likely to be offered as the Android smart home (Android Home, Android Wear, Android Auto, etc.), Google’s interest in this market makes a lot of sense given the success of Android. Leveraging that market penetration to bring a hardware platform to market is a sensible business plan by itself – but one that is massively improved when Google’s software and services are thrown into the mix too, tying more and more users more stickily into the Google ecosystem.

In conjunction with the Works With Nest program, which certifies products that will work within the current Nest product ecosystem, Thread provides a way to add connectivity to new products to ensure interoperability, using fairly common 802.15.4 physical hardware and the Thread software stack – which threatens to erode or snatch ZigBee deployments thanks to its shared MAC and PHY layers, as well as the support for native IPv6.

Source : Rethinkresearch

10 steps to building a smart city

1. Work out what problems need fixing 

Too many smart city visions concentrate on big data and the internet of things when there are more fundamental problems, says Tom Saunders, a senior researcher at Nesta. Take Jakarta and Beijing: “They are both currently exploring data dashboards and citywide sensing projects to address issues around traffic congestion, when what these cities really need are vastly improved public transport systems.


2. Find a leader 

For Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarape Institute, leaders should come from the public sector. “Some of the standout smart cities – Barcelona, Amsterdam, Malmo – exhibited dynamic leadership from their mayors as well as chief executives,” he says. “Crucially, they did not leave the evolution of the city to the market … In parts of Africa and Asia smart cities are almost purely private sector-driven. As a result, we are seeing elaborate hi-tech satellite cities gathering dust.” The Olympic rings light up the stadium during the Opening Ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics Facebook Twitter Pinterest The London 2012 Olympics brought different sectors together. 

3. Develop a vision everyone can get behind 

The Olympics is a good example of a shared goal, which succeeded in bringing together communities, the public and private sectors, academia, volunteers and business. “Many smart city projects fail in communicating the vision, capturing the imagination of people so they can be bothered to participate,” says Priya Prakash, the founder of Design for Social Change. “There is a cultural dimension missing in the conversation.


4. Make a business case 

Networks of sensors need expensive infrastructure, and there’s currently little precedent around whether it’s the taxpayer or industry that foots the bill. A vision that adds economic, social and environmental value could be key to attracting investment from tech companies, universities and elsewhere. “The tech is probably the easiest bit to fix,” says Stuart Higgins, of Cisco UK & Ireland. “Who pays, who drives the changes, who should be involved – they are all bigger challenges.

 5. Share data and incentivise innovation 

Open data is critical to fostering an ecosystem for innovation, says Tomas Holderness, a chartered geographer and Smart research fellow. But the public sector, with its entrenched ideas around data protection, can be reluctant to share. Mara Balestrini, partner at Ideas for Change, says city councils should see it as “investment rather than expenditure: I’m sure it would cost them a lot more to solve public transport issues by themselves”. Without a strong business case, councils risk wasting money on internet of things Read more 

6. Design from the bottom up 

“We have learned from past technology failures that large projects are doomed but breaking down projects into bite-size pieces often works better,” says Yodit Stanton, founder and CEO of OpenSensor.io. Fujisawa, Japan, is an example of a city designed from the ground up. “It’s a disaster proof, self-sufficient town with self-cleaning homes that generates its own electricity,” says Cisco’s Higgins. “Even the streets are designed to reduce energy consumption – they follow the shape of a leaf to help natural airflow and reduce the need for AC.


7. Tread carefully 

“We are still in the early days of exploring the costs and benefits of these technologies for society and business and perhaps a more cautious approach is needed,” says George Roussos, a professor of pervasive computing at Birkbeck College, University of London. He warns of the complicated issues around privacy that need addressing.

 8. Get politicians on board 

Political leaders are important for communicating the need for new tech, and assuaging citizens’ concerns about safety and privacy. “It would be great to see politicians explain why they are spending our taxes on a smarter city,” says Stefan Schurig, director of climate and energy at the World Future Council. “Dare I say they might even be able to justify why spending more on tech, even during times of ever-decreasing budgets, would deliver greater benefits.

9. Educate citizens 

A smart city will be irrelevant to most of its inhabitants unless they can learn how to use new technology, says Adam Dennett, lecturer in smart cities at UCL. Very few people can pull live data from an API or set up a new sensor network to monitor air pollution – but until more can, smart cities risk being “little more than a marketing tool for big business”, he says. 

 10. Spread the word 

Nesta’s Saunders, author of Rethinking smart cities from the ground up, calls for all cities to share evidence so that no one has to start from scratch: “This could be something as simple as blogging about the experience … but cities could also form networks, to share the lessons from their IoT pilots.” There’s enormous opportunity for new projects to rethink “old paradigms of urban planning” and “leapfrog old tech”, says Muggah, of the Igarape Institute – but he’s alarmed by the separation between the collaboration going on in richer cities and that in the vast majority of cities and slums in Africa and Asia.

Source: The guardian

Secure Communications applied to Internet-of-Things (IoT)

Orange selects Semtech’s LoRa RF for low-power wide area networks in France’s smart cities

Orange selects Semtech’s LoRa RF for low-power wide area networks in France’s smart cities - M2M Now - News and expert opinions on the M2M industry, machine to machine magazine

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SIGFOX - WHAT WILL YOU CONNECT?

What is a Capillary Network in the IoT/M2M services?

A capillary network is a local network that uses short-range radio-access technologies to provide local connectivity to things and devices. By leveraging the key capabilities of cellular networks – ubiquity, integrated security, network management and advanced backhaul connectivity – capillary networks will become a key enabler of the Networked Society
Capillary networks use short-range radio to provide local connectivity connecting to the global communication infrastructure through a capillary gateway. Capillary networks are a smart way to connect the billions of things and devices that need connectivity, but some new functionality will be needed.....more info

Source:Ericsson

IoT Network Provider

Qowisio, A French company that provides a low bandwidth internet of things (IoT) network has announced to have raised €10 million to build its first public network to cover France, a network that is expected to have full coverage (1,500 to 1,800 antennas) end of December. 

The startup is however not a new player in the space as they have already built 18 private IoT networks for customers spread in 29 countries (Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East). Their networks are currently transmitting 4.6 million messages daily. 

The revenue of the startup is already expected to be in the €15 million range in 2015 after a cumulative revenue of €9 million in the previous years since its inception in 2009. 

“We have already deployed ten of thousands network antennas for our various customers,“ said Cyrille Le Floch, CEO of Qowisio. 

Qowisio is however not keen on unveiling the name of the customers, big companies in “the energy and the telecom“ sectors Le Floch said.

Qowisio is using Ultra Narrow Band technology which provides a low cost, low power, long range network. Working with large companies looking after comprehensive solutions, Qowisio has developed a technology that covers the full stack of IoT from sensors, to the network, to the cloud and the final application. 

Qowisio is part of a space that is heating up fast with LoRa and Sigfox technologies as competitors. But Qowisio is departing from the Sigfox pricing approach of a yearly fee per device. 

“Our competitors are focussing too much on the network in the value chain, and they are applying an old telco model offering a per device per year fee. At Qowisio we believe this old model is not going to work in the IoT world. For example, there will be many devices that will have a very short lifespan. One of our customer for example have GPS beacons which are used a single time for 2-3 days to monitor the transport of assets. A per year pricing clearly does not work here.“ 

It will be interesting to see how the competition is developing in this space and enabling a larger range of tracking applications. One year ago it looked like there was not much competition on the Sigfox market, now the Toulouse company is just one among others. 

Source:.gpsbusinessnews

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Smart City Concepts

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “India is to be found not in its few cities, but in its 700,000 villages.” Though that may at one time have been true, it is no longer the case. With about 30 country dwellers moving lock, stock and barrel every minute from Indian villages to become city dwellers, not many villages will be left in India by end of this century.

Towards the end of the last decade, our planet achieved two remarkable feats. First, our human population crossed the seven billion mark and for the first time in history, 50 percent of the world’s population was living in urban areas. This is expected to accelerate to 60 percent before 2025, globally; with the Western, developed world reaching an 80 percent urbanization level during this time frame. Urbanization has become so important that it has elevated some cities, like Brussels, Seoul, Bogota, and many more, to be even more important than the countries themselves contributing to over 40 percent of the country’s GDP. Interestingly, the UK has already demonstrated its efforts in focusing on this Mega Trend of urbanization and city as growth hubs with the creation of a new ministry role called the “minister for cities.” This person is tasked with unlocking the economic potential of cities, thus giving them more empowerment and freedom to do so.

As we further congregate in cities, it has become more important to make cities not only green, but also efficient. As a result, we are now seeing some early examples of what I would describe as eco-friendly cities. There are several cities that are focusing on specific aspects that help it run efficiently, such as on their transport, energy and waste management. In example, implementation of smart grids is being pushed heavily for smart energy management. Major energy companies like GE are building and operating smart grids for cities such as Atlanta for a monthly fee through a cloud platform.

While smart energy is essential, it is not the only aspect of a Smart City. A more coherent view of what exactly a Smart City is was made by my team at Frost & Sullivan, who scanned through numerous Smart City projects and initiatives currently undertaken globally and found some key parallels among them. We identified eight key aspects that define a Smart City: smart governance, smart energy, smart building, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart technology, smart healthcare and smart citizen.

Source: Sarwant Singh - Forbes

Smart Cities need Intelligent Platforms to thrive, says new report from Beecham Research

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Connectivity analytics: More valuable than application analytics? - M2M Now - News and expert opinions on the M2M industry, machine to machine magazine

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Mobilizing Intelligent Transport Systems Report

The transport sector is one of the fastest growing verticals in the IoT and one in which operators can play a key role.

The Mobilizing Intelligent Transport Systems Report is an adapted version of theIntelligent Transport Systems for Mobile Report released in June 2015. This adapted report is more concise yet still provides an exhaustive and rigorous account of how IoT solutions can serve ITS.  In so doing, the report examines a number of case studies, helping readers to better understand the ITS landscape and how appropriate policy and regulation can aid the deployment of ITS solutions.

The report concludes that mobile network operators (MNOs) have a crucial a role to play in ITS.

Representative IoT Platform Vendors

Representative IoT Platform Vendors according to Gartner

1. AT&T
2. Axiros
3. Bosch Software Innovations
4. Candi
5. Eurotech
6. GE
7. HP
8. IBM
9. LogMeIn
10. MachineShop
11. Microsoft
12. Oracle
13. PTC
14. SAP
15. Solair
16. Telit

The first carrier grade Low Power Wide Area network (LPWAN) protocol is now available for sensor, base station and network server providers

The LoRaWAN R1.0 specification today attained Public Release status and is now available to download from the LoRa Alliance website. The LoRa Alliance and its members, amongst which include many industry leaders and Mobile Network Operators, see this as a major step towards international standardization in LPWAN, catalyzing network deployments and certified sensor manufacturing around the world. The Alliance members have collaborated, sharing knowledge and experience and intensively testing the LoRaWAN R1.0 specification to ensure readiness for the entire ecosystem. This will drive the global success of the LoRaWAN Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) and guarantee interoperability in one open carrier grade global network....more info