Creative Connectivity

The Battle for Mesh. Bluetooth vs Thread?

It’s a New Year, which means it’s time for the annual week of madness in Las Vegas which is the Consumer Electronics Show. For four days, the electronics industry comes together to tell consumers what they ought to be buying, whilst analysts and the media try to predict what will really be the hot product sector for the coming year.

Over the last few years, as PCs, tablets and phones have lost their wow factor, that’s proven to be a little more difficult than it used to be. In 2014, the consensus was that wearables would be the next big thing. They have definitely made strides beyond basic step counting, but are still smouldering rather than setting the world on fire. Instead, the innovation which caught the public imagination at CES in 2014 was the selfie stick.

In 2015, the smart money was on smart homes. But with a few exceptions, consumers felt the smart thing to do with their money was to buy more selfie sticks. This year, the pundits will probably predict that 2016 will be the year of the drone. My guess is that most consumers will still prefer to buy selfie sticks. Unless someone comes up with cheap drones that take selfies*.

Of course, like all good works of fiction, the CES show contains a number of interesting subplots, one of which will be the battle for mesh.

LoRa vs LTE-M vs Sigfox

There‘s a battle going on for the infrastructure technology that will support the Internet of Things. Currently the three most talked about contenders are Sigfox, LoRa and LTE-M. There are a lot of other alternatives and it’s quite possible that none of LoRa, Sigfox nor LTE-M0 will win, but that’s another story. If you search for LPWAN (Low Power Wireless Area Networks) you’ll see that the battle for supremacy is a hot topic. It’s largely because of the impending loss of the GPRS networks which power much of today’s M2M business. As a result, almost every day you’ll find another article debating their respective technical merits.

I’m going to argue that these comparisons miss the point. Which technology will win depends far more on the business model than on the underlying technology. The three technologies listed above are interesting to compare, as they exemplify three significantly different approaches to an IoT business, which can be broadly summed up as:

Sigfox – become a global Internet of Things operator
LoRa – provide a technology that lets other companies enable a global Internet of Things
LTE-M – evolve an existing technology to make more money for network operators

Between them they promise to help us get to the predicted 50 billion connected devices in 2020. A winning solution could allow the IoT to take off and make its supporters a lot of money. The ones that fail may be limited to niche applications and lose investors hundreds of millions of dollars. Only one is likely to win. It’s also possible that all of the current pretenders could lose. So let’s forget the technology and look at the business models.

GB Smart Meters Delayed Again. Again.

It’s that time of year when the days get dark and cold, and the energy media turns its interest to the possibility of power cuts in the coming winter. Which also means it’s the time for DECC to slip out their Annual Report on the Roll-out of Smart Meters, in the hope that no one will notice it.

As expected, everything’s slipped, but this time, for the first time, we get an example of how DECC fudges the benefits figures they claim justify the smart metering programme. I sometimes wonder whether I’m the only person who reads these reports beyond the rose-tinted executive summary, as if you dig beneath the spin, they tell a clear and repeated story of a project that is going badly wrong. So for anyone who didn’t make it past page 6, here’s the truth about what’s happening with the GB smart metering deployment.

What sort of Hardware Startup are You?

Everybody seems to agree that it’s never been easier to start a hardware company than it is today. After years of being eclipsed by software and services, hardware is sexy again. However, that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to be successful. Over the past few years I’ve mentored a number of startups and realised that their expectations often don’t match the reality of what they are. That doesn’t mean they can’t succeed, but it does mean that they’re probably wasting effort trying to be the wrong sort of company. There are lots of different models which can be successful, but a company is most likely to work if it knows where it is going and what it wants to be.

Hence this article. If you’re contemplating a hardware startup, or have already taken the first steps, you need to think seriously about what you want to be doing in five or ten years’ time and how you’re going to get there. It’s every bit as important as getting your product out. Recognising that gives you the best chance of achieving your goal and minimises the risk to your investors and employees – considerations which should be at the top of your priority list. It still won’t be easy, but if you can reduce some unnecessary pain by getting the right model, it will certainly be a lot less stressful.

Use More Energy. Towards a UK Energy Policy

Three years ago, in a utility conference in Atlanta, I sat through a keynote by Tom Fanning, President and CEO of Southern Company – one of the largest US utilities. In a typically Texan barn-storming style he argued that “to improve human existence let’s use more energy where we should”, going on to promote the message that every Texan in every trailer park was equally deserving of air conditioning and a 60″ TV. It wasn’t what the audience expected, many of whom had come with concerns about smart meters, energy efficiency and outages.

Earlier this week I sat through the IET’s annual Mountbatten lecture, given by Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford. The subject was The New Energy Landscape – low fossil fuel prices, decarbonisation and new technologies, based on his updated book – “The Carbon Crunch: How we’re getting climate change wrong – and how to fix it”. Much to the surprise of the audience, this time mainly engineers involved with the energy industry, he gave much the same message – that’s it’s time to stop worrying about the cost of energy or energy efficiency. Instead we should be planning a future where we can use as much as we want.

I urge you to watch his lecture, which is available on the IET website. At the risk of oversimplification here’s my very abbreviated take on it, as well as some of the potential problems in changing Government policy.

M2M’s impending Hole in the Air

All of a sudden, there’s a lot of activity in the Long Range wireless network community. In France, Orange has just announced that they’re going to follow in Bouygues’ footsteps in deploying a LoRa network for M2M which will cover the whole of metropolitan France. That in turn follows on from a similar announcement from KPN that they are planning to do the same thing in Holland, while Proximus are going to cover Belgium and Luxembourg. It’s a bit like a rerun of the SigFox PR offensive, after they managed to sign up operators in France, Holland, Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Spain, the U.K. and San Francisco. Nor is it just a European phenomenon. In the U.S., Ingenu, the company which was formerly known as On Ramp, has raised $100 million to roll out its own similar, proprietary network. It seems that there’s a new announcement almost every day. So it’s interesting to look at why mobile operators are desperately announcing new network technologies to support M2M and IoT applications, when just a few months ago they gave the impression that they would rule the IoT with their 4G networks.

When you stop and look behind all of this activity, you see something that should be worrying the M2M and IoT industry (which is not the same as the cellular industry). For the last fifteen years they’ve not had to worry much about how they make their data connections – they just embedded a GPRS module and bought a data contract. But look forward a few years and there’s a worrying hole in the air as networks start to switch off their GPRS networks. That’s just beginning to dawn on network operators, who see an unexpectedly unpleasant vision of the future, in which their anticipated IoT revenues could disappear into thin air.