Bluetooth, Hearables, IoT, Smart Energy and other random Stuff
There are times when the serendipitous becomes just too compelling and you feel you need to share it with the world. As I was doing some brand research for a future article I noticed that Neilsen’s recent survey of grocery brands places Dairylea in Position 69. Does that make it the world’s most sexy cheese?
In an equally serendipitous coincidence, Position 70 in the same survey goes to Innocent.
Normal service will be resumed shortly.
Just as the battle was starting up again for wireless dominance within the smart meter industry, Californian utility Pacific Gas & Energy (PG&E) may have come up with the ultimate answer – don’t turn on the radio in the meter. It’s one of those cunning plans which will have the various standards body queuing up to make sure they’re responsible for the chip which is never connected.
This bizarre situation arises from the decision back in March this year, when PG&E worked out what to do with their electro-sensitive customers who were demanding that they weren’t radiated with emissions emanating from their smart meters. PG&E put forward a proposal to make customers pay for non-smart meters, charging somewhere between $135 and $270 a year for the privilege of having a good old-fashioned meter reader come round and leave them a note to say they were out when he called. The double whammy benefit that none of the media appeared to pick up is that the $270 charge would eat into these user’s mobile phone bill, so they’d have less money to spend on getting radiated by phoning their local papers to campaign against smart meters. More affluent customers could have the gold plated option of paying several thousand dollars to have their meters moved to the top of local telegraph poles, or buried underground.
PG&E reckoned that this option would be taken up by 185,400 customers. (I don’t know how they got to that precise figure. Although by a strange coincidence, 1854 is the year that Texas was connected by telegraph to the rest of the US, putting in place the telecoms network that Enron would use so effectively 150 years later.) Anyway, this number presented PG&E with a problem. 185,400 is not a lot in terms of commissioning a special non-wireless meter. So they were faced with the prospect of having to pay more for a non-smart meter, wiping out a substantial part of that $50 million annual windfall from their more sensitive customers. Today they announced a solution – they’d supply the same wireless smart meter, but turn the radio off. Enter the wirelessless meter.
The Smart Metering and Smart Homes exhibition in Amsterdam is Europe’s largest show for this industry, so it’s a good reflection of where things are at. Given the amount of noise that’s been generated around ZigBee and its Smart Energy Profile, I’d expected to see most of the other wireless contenders to be absent or skulking in their cages. However, someone walking around without those preconceptions might have gone home with a rather different view of the state of play.
There’s no doubt that ZigBee is well placed in current smart meter deployments. Although there are quite a limited number of real ZigBee deployments in Europe, the UK has more or less committed to SEP 1.2 for its foundation phase of national deployment and most meter and IHD suppliers were showing ZigBee products, albeit with not very many sporting a ZigBee certified logo.
Despite that, a significant number of suppliers were also highlighting support for the new Wireless M-Bus standard, which has slithered down the spectrum to its new resting point of 169 MHz. Wireless M-Bus has always had a popular following within Germany, with an implementation based on a radio running at 868 MHz. The shift to the lower frequency acknowledges one of the enduring complaints which the 868MHz camp has levelled at 2.4GHz solutions, which is their potentially limited range.
Whilst 2.4GHz is a frequency that’s fine for most houses, it faces challenges with blocks of flats. Up until now, the 868 MHz triumvirate of Wireless M-Bus, Z-Wave and wireless KNX had always given the impression that they could achieve adequate range at 868 MHz. This break in the 868 MHz ranks does not augur well for a reasoned debate, but just increases the in-fighting and paranoia about whether any radio standard works or is ready for deployment. That’s not what Smart Metering needs.
One of the more interesting recent announcements in the wireless space has been the appointment of two new companies to the Board of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) – Apple and Nordic Semiconductor.
Neither are immediately obvious candidates, which is what makes this interesting. But taking a deeper look their appointment could highlight some interesting changes in where Bluetooth is going.
Back in 1996 I was part of a small startup – Grey Cell Systems – which against all odds won a contract to write a PC based, GSM data stack for Samsung’s first mobile phone. A few weeks after we got the contract we were invited to a meeting at Samsung’s research centre near London, where the phone was being designed. A senior manager had come over from Korea to tell us Samsung’s vision. I could see all of the listening engineers trying to suppress as grin as his translator told the assembled audience that Samsung’s strategy was to become number one in mobile phones by 2001. At the time Samsung didn’t even have a phone – that would take at least three attempts and several years and none of us in that meeting could believe their optimism. They didn’t reach that goal. They still haven’t, but they’re not far off. And since 2003, they’ve been the only company Nokia has admitted to being scared of.
Samsung have made it to number one in Europe: in the first quarter of this year, shipping 13.2 million units – 600,000 ahead of Nokia. But for the last few years I’ve been tracking a slightly different metric – the combined sales of Samsung and LG, which I’ve called Korea Inc. They’ve been closing the gap and in the latest figures from IDC we can see that they can now claim supremacy, pushing Nokia firmly into second place.
Every so often you hear something that seems fairly trivial at the time, but then, as you think about it, you realise that it contains a fundamental truth. That happened to me a few weeks ago when I was speaking at the Smart Metering UK conference in London.
One of the speakers before me was Aidan O’Neill of PrePayPower in Ireland. Aidan made a statement that the bulk of his customers spend more each day on cigarettes than they do on electricity. It’s one of those throw-away lines that doesn’t really impinge at the time. Let me explain why it’s so important.