Creative Connectivity

Brexit – a Tragedy of Shakespearean Proportions

Last Friday, many of us in the UK woke up to discover that our world had changed. Despite every poll indication to the contrary, the country had voted to leave the EU. There’s an irony in that vote – Tory ministers repeatedly berate our education system for not putting enough emphasis on Shakespeare. The result showed that they have no room to talk, for as Coriolanus would have told them, the people have resoundingly spoken with the yea and no of general ignorance.

The question is, what now? It has been a particularly nasty campaign, devoid of facts and based on the basest of emotions as rhetoric sank to the lowest common denominator, dividing friends and family in a manner which I have never seen before. Truth has been a casualty, as has Jo Cox. There is no question that many, assured by the polls that the result would be a vote to remain, took the opportunity to vote against the Government, attempting to bloody the eye of what is almost universally seen as a disconnected posh elite. They were shocked to find that rather than pecking the eagles, the crows had ripped out their own eyes on Friday morning.

So what now?

Squirrels, Grid Security and a Stuffed Rudd

Probably the most effective way for any terrorist group or belligerent power to cripple a Western nation and bring it to its knees is to destroy its electricity grid. Without power, most of the infrastructure will crumble into chaos within a few weeks. Manufacturing would come to a standstill, along with healthcare, transport, banking, mobile communications and retail. That was seen in Iraq, where 70% of the generating capacity was destroyed during the Gulf war, in what has been described as a crime against humanity. At that time, grid destruction relied on physical means – dropping bombs on power stations and sub-stations. As we integrate more electronics and software into the grid, you no longer need expensive munitions to blow things up – terrorists can do it from a computer.

It’s two years since I last wrote about the cybersecurity issues within the GB smart meter rollout. At that time the response from the industry was dismissive. In the past six months, three things have happened which bring the risk back into focus. We’ve seen the first major grid cyber attack in the Ukraine; secondly, smart home owners with Nest thermostats have discovered that firmware updates can stop them operating and the third is that reports have come in of smart meters in the UK which have stopped working. None of that means our grid is going to be hacked tomorrow, but they all point out that what has been dismissed as impossible may not be quite so difficult as the industry and DECC would like to believe. Despite that, heads are still firmly in the sand as the UK Government continues to press ahead with a smart metering programme that is not so much climate-friendly as terrorist-friendly.

Smart Power, Smart Meters and Smart Batteries

This week saw the launch of a new report entitled Smart Power, which investigates the future of our electricity supply. It comes from a new body – the National Infrastructure Committee (NIC), and highlights the hole in supply caused by the planned closure of two thirds of our existing power stations by 2030, providing recommendations on the changes that they believe are required to ensure security of supply.

Unfortunately it’s promoted itself using the old trick of highlighting its major benefit as saving consumers money, with the headline press message suggesting it could deliver them savings of up to £8.1 billion per year in 2030.

I wish that the sector could get over its fixation with these spurious claims, so that we can focus on the real problem, which is the lack of a joined up energy policy. The “savings” in this report aren’t what a consumer would expect a saving to be, which is lower prices, but instead a potential reining in of cripplingly higher prices which would result from doing nothing. In other words, if we spend a bit more to increase bills now, we might not have to spend a lot more as a result of a further decade of dithering. It reminds me of the protection rackets of gangster Chicago, where shopkeepers were forced to pay off mobsters to prevent having their businesses destroyed. Why the energy sector wants to continue with its amateur production of “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” escapes me, but that’s clearly who the commission’s chair, Lord Adonis, is modelling himself on. Cauliflowers all round…

NB-IOT. The Internet of Bikes and Labradors.

If you attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, you might have thought that the Internet of Things was mainly about bikes and labradors, as they were the mainstay of applications which were depicted on most IoT stands. The reason for that was a marketing push for Narrow Band IoT (NB-IOT) orchestrated by the GSM Association, who had picked up on two applications from early trials and was promoting them at every opportunity.

There’s probably a good market for tracking labradors, as in my experience they’re not the smartest breed in the canine world, but they’re definitely a lot smarter than anyone who believed the IoT message that the network operators were pushing out in Barcelona. According to companies like Vodafone, commercial trials were only four months away, with commercial services next year. But you need more than marketing to make something happen. So here’s my view of the real progress of NB-IOT.

Hearables at the Mobile World Congress

For most people these days, personal music means phones. Although our love for personal music started with Sony’s Walkman, it was transformed by Apple’s iPod, launching the iconic images of wires trailing from our ears. Since then, billions of users have moved to smartphones as the device of choice for personal music, increasingly using streaming services like Spotify. So the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is a useful touchstone to gauge how that industry is taking note of the way we listen to audio.

For much of the last decade what we put in or on our ears has changed little. Dr Dre voiced his frustration at the “sub-dollar earbuds” that most people use, as a prime reason for manufacturing his range of Beats headsets. But it’s only in the last year that we’ve seen the emergence of real changes. The first is a sudden growth in wireless headsets, thought to be linked to the rise in mobile video and the inconvenience of cables when holding a handset. The second is the shipment of the first hearables in the form of wireless earbuds, which fit into each ear. They started with two successful crowdfunded campaigns, one from Earin in Sweden, the other from Bragi in Munich with their Dash earbuds, adds the further refinement of health and fitness sensors. Both are now shipping, along with Doppler’s Here. In their wake, over twenty other hearable devices have been successfully funded and a growing number of established manufacturers are joining in. So I was fascinated to see what the industry would be showcasing in Barcelona.

Ericsson slashes cellular IoT device forecast by 20 billion

Back in 2010, Ericsson set the bar for much of the subsequent hype around the Internet of Things by making a very pubic prediction that by 2020 there would be 50 billion internet connected devices. Others have been more or less aggressive, suggesting “conservative” numbers of 20 billion, while some have stretched credulity with projections up to 1.5 trillion. The 50 billion isn’t just IoT, it covers everything from phones to smart TVs to tractors, but the biggest single element is what we now call the Internet of Things, with the original 50 billion prediction including around 20 billion cellular IoT connections.

Most analysts have supported the Ericsson line with an estimate somewhere between 30 and 50 billion. But just before Christmas, in their latest Mobility Report, Ericsson quietly changed their minds. They still kept the headline number of around 50 billion connected devices, but dropped the number of cellular connected IoT devices in 2020 from their previous estimate of 20 billion to just over 1 billion.

The important word here is cellular. This week, as the mobile community gathered in Barcelona for their annual jamboree, which is the Mobile World Congress, the industry was still full of expectation that they would own the Internet of Things, and more importantly, the revenue associated with it. Ericsson doesn’t want to spoil that hope with any blatant contradictions, but if you look more closely at the implication of their new numbers, the IoT aspirations of the networks look less than rosy, as their revenue projections begin to disappear into thin air.