Creative Connectivity

13 Companies announce NB-IoT Chips

If history is anything to go by, it’s going to be unlucky for some, but it’s an indication of the momentum which is growing around cellular IoT that so many chip companies have jumped on the bandwagon.

It’s not cheap to develop a cellular chip, even one that is moderately simple, such as is the case with the NB-IoT standard. Back in 2012, when I wrote about the cost of developing wireless standards, I put it at around $6 million for each chip and protocol stack. That was looking at Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. With the additional complexity of any cellular standard, along with network interoperability testing, it becomes far more expensive, as you need to test with as many operators as possible. Hence the development cost to get a chip and stack to market is probably at least $15 million.

With thirteen different companies bringing chips to market, that’s an investment of around $200 million. Some of these have tried to cut their development time by acquiring start-ups which were already some way down the route. Sony purchased Altair, Huawei bought Neul, ARM bought NextG-Com and Mistbase, Goodix acquired CommSolid, while Nordic Semiconductor picked up around 60 engineers in Finland’s Oulu. We don’t know how much they spent on these acquisitions, but it’s probably well over $200 million. Add to that the costs of the standardisation process, infrastructure development and initial market trials and it’s clear that somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion has already been spent on getting NB-IoT to the point where it is today. That’s a level of investment that should be worrying competing standards like LoRa and Sigfox, as the NB-IoT companies will do all they can to recoup their investment.

Four Highlights from MWC2018

For anyone involved with mobile phones, networks or the IoT, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the place to be in February. Over four days, the industry reveals its latest and fanciest ideas in the ongoing evolution of mobile telephony. It is vast. This year around 2,300 companies were exhibiting, several with stands large enough to fit a passenger jet in; over 100,000 visitors were wandering around it, including senior politicians and royalty and the organising industry body – the GSMA (God Save Mobile Analysts) probably raked in around $100 million in revenue. Which is more than some of the sectors it is promoting will make this year.

It’s not a show famed for radical new technology. Unlike CES, which gives us technical wonders like the selfie stick, MWC is about gradual evolution. But that is gradual evolution of a very, very successful industry – one that likes to take the annual opportunity to convene in Barcelona and flaunt its success.

So what was new? For me, there were four things which stood out. That might feel minor, but when you’re trying to predict the future, it’s difficult to judge. These are the ripples and butterflies that could bring massive change. No-one in the industry thought SMS and messaging would take off. But they were happy to bet on WAP as the mobile internet, which only goes to prove you should never believe an analyst or futurologist. So here’s my choice of four things which took my fancy.

What’s next for AirPods?

There’s growing speculation that Apple will be launching their next generation of AirPods sometime this year, so I thought it would be interesting to try to predict what might be in their next generation of earbuds. The hearables market is moving very quickly and there’s no shortage of technology for Apple to choose from. But the AirPods are a little different to anything else that Apple has ever brought to market.

The biggest difference is the way it has changed their development model. Historically, Apple is a follower. They don’t invent product categories – they wait for other major companies to create the market, then come in with a slicker product which delights customers. They concentrate on everything which is needed for people to feel that Apple invented the experience. After that, they create clear water between themselves and their competitors by constantly increasing the level of delight. The AirPod is arguably the first product where Apple have made the market themselves. There was a smattering of crowdfunded earbuds before the AirPods were announced, but they were only shipping in tens of thousands. In contrast, AirPods are shipping in the millions. For once, Apple wasn’t competing with established industry giants, but small, often poorly funded startups. That’s what makes the question of what might be in an AirPod 2 or AirPod 3 so interesting.

Apple, Samsung and Volkswagen. How firmware can damage your business.

It should have been a good Christmas for Apple. Millions of happy Apple fans were likely to unwrap one of their products on Christmas Day. But just a week before, Apple got a present it really didn’t want. The news broke that they had been releasing updates which slowed down the performance of older phones.

The reason for doing this is that as lithium batteries age, their performance gets worse. If you keep on putting the same demands on them, there is a double risk – they may degrade faster and need to be replaced, or in an extreme case, they could fail, possibly disastrously. So, there is a definite logic in trying to limit those demands to keep the user physically safe.

However, it’s a difficult concept to sell. Consider if an automotive manufacturer were to do the same thing with your electric car. If you bought the car on the basis that it had a top speed of 80 mph and a range of 200 miles, you’d probably be rather irate if, twelve months later, you discovered that they’d decided to restrict the top speed to 35mph, in order to ensure that the range didn’t fall below 200 miles. But that’s what the headline claims against Apple are implying – that unbeknownst to the users, software updates are deliberately throttling back the phone’s performance. The electric car example above is not a valid comparison, but to understand why requires a level of technical knowledge that few journalists or lawyers possess. They’d rather cast Apple as the villain, turning this into an Applegate conspiracy. Viva fake news.

Hearables. A Lust for Translation

And lo, they spake in many tongues. And verily, some of them even began to ship.

So beginneth the first chapter in the Book of Hearables. We have reached the point where you can buy a device that you put in your ear, which can translate what someone is saying to you in another language in real time. After several years of marketing and hype, consumers are suddenly spoilt for choice, with Waverly’s Pilot, Mymanu’s Clik and Google’s Pixel Buds all appearing within a few weeks of each other. It’s Google recent announcement which has caught the public imagination, but that’s mainly a result of the scale of their marketing machine. With less media attention, other startup companies have been quietly beavering away, mostly in the crowdfunded arena.

Anyone who’s been following the evolution of earbuds over the last few years will have been aware of the trend. After Bragi invented the hearable category with their Dash earbuds, others started to experiment with different features and applications, looking for ways to make the things we stick in our ears do more exciting things than just play music. A startup called Waverly Labs was the first to concentrate on translation, back in June 2016, when they launched a campaign on Indiegogo for their Pilot earpieces, which promised to translate between five languages – English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. Others weren’t far behind, with Doppler (sadly deceased), Mymanu, Human, Inspear, Bragi, Lingmo, TimeKettle and a host of others joining in the race to wean us off Spotify and Pandora and start us talking to our fellow mortals. (Although if we’d rather listen to music than talk to people who speak the same language, it’s questionable whether there’s a massive market in wanting to talk to those who don’t.)

Is Sigfox the Uber of the IoT?

I’ve been wondering for some time how long it will be before Sigfox ditches their own proprietary protocol and adopts a different standard, probably going for NB-IoT. Whilst many may question why they’d do it, making the assumption that the Sigfox protocol is their crown jewels, I’d question that assumption. Last week, at the Sigfox World Expo in Prague, they made an announcement that suggests that that day may not be too far away. I firmly believe that it has to happen, because Sigfox’s business model is looking a lot like Uber’s, which means going for global domination by any means possible. The means to that end is probably not based on their own proprietary protocol.