Creative Connectivity

The End of the One Trick Wireless Pony. Or is it?

And then there were none. Last month Silicon Labs acquired Ember – the last independent ZigBee chip manufacturer. It’s good news for the Smart Metering industry as it’s secured a future for Ember, who have become the chip and protocol stack supplier of choice for a large proportion of smart meters, IHDs and home gateways in the market today. It’s not such good news for the investment community, as the $72 million initial consideration from SiLabs is a little short of the $89 million investment that had gone into Ember. But given the fire sales of the other ZigBee start-ups, it’s still not a bad result.

And it could be one of those excellent fits that don’t come along that often. For Silicon Labs, it extends their radio technology into the hotly contested 2.4GHz band, complementing their very capable sub-GHz range of EZRadio PRO chips. It also gives them what I’d consider to be the best ZigBee stack on the market. And it gives Ember what must be a very comforting degree of financial security as well as a ready made range of sub-GHz radios, just at the point where the UK and Japanese smart metering communities are looking at 868MHz.

But it’s not just Ember getting gobbled up. A few weeks later, Samsung quietly acquired Nanoradio – the Swedish specialist in low power Wi-Fi for mobile phones. Both Ember and Nanoradios played the standards card and had essentially become one trick wireless ponies – a fate common to many wireless start-ups. Perversely, CSR did the opposite thing today, by divesting itself of much of its location technology, (which it had acquired from SiRF), to Samsung, who seem to be getting rather good at acquiring bits of wireless technology. In doing so CSR moved itself back closer to its Bluetooth roots.

Although the prospect of an acquisition is the raison d’être of most wireless silicon start-ups, I wonder whether this flurry of activity indicates that we’re nearing an end-game? In which case, what comes next?

Posh Boys push Smart Meters

DECC – the Government department leading the Smart Metering deployment in the UK recently published their latest research on consumer attitudes to Smart Metering. It reports the results of in depth interviews with 120 representative members of the population on their feelings about Smart Meters and IHDs.

The research was conducted in February this year, several months before the Conservative backbencher Nadine Dorries described her Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne as “two posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk”. She wasn’t referring to the UK Smart Metering programme, but it was a pretty good description of what these 120 respondents thought of the smart meter deployment, telling researchers that it “sounds like it’s from someone who doesn’t have trouble paying their bills”.

The report is not all bad news. The respondents included people who had received In Home Energy Displays and in general they liked them. They thought they provided real benefits. In contrast, they had difficulty in seeing what the added value of the smart meter was.

I suspect DECC is busy trying to massage the results to make it look as if the survey supported smart metering, helped by some rather ambiguous leading questions. But the content highlights a growing division within the smart metering programme, which is whether it is meant to be there for the benefit of consumers or for the benefit of utilities?

The Cost of Wireless Standards

How much does it cost to produce a wireless standard? And how long does it take? Surprisingly those aren’t questions that are asked very often – probably because most developers are happy to use what already exists rather than starting again from scratch.

In the UK, some members of the smart metering programme have begun asking these questions, potentially for the wrong reasons. They’ve realised that ZigBee – the current front-runner for the UK smart metering deployment, can’t provide the range to cope with every single house or block of flats, and have started wondering about whether it might make sense to start again from scratch.

A few years ago, when I was writing my book on the Essentials of Short Range Wireless I attempted to put some numbers to those questions. It seems an appropriate time to publish them, as the answers are a lot more and a lot longer than most people think.

Rigoletto and the Automaton
(or Shaking up the NHS)

I’ve always thought that the music for the opening chorus of Rigoletto foreshadowed the modern party political conference. It is a piece about court sycophancy and conspiracy which says everything about political intrigue.

There’s a long tradition of resetting opera to make satirical points. Ned Sherrin and Alistair Beaton did it in the Kinnock and Thatcher era with the Metropolitan Mikado and the Ratepayer’s Iolanthe. More recently Music Theatre London set the trend for pithy new translations which led to a resurgence of exciting new small scale opera productions. But we seem to have lost the politics.

Rigoletto feels as if its authors had anticipated our most recent political incumbents – the powerful, confident stride of Blair the leader, imperiously parting the faithful as he strides with his sycophantic train to the dais. And in the shadows the poison dwarf, reviled by the rest of the party, who will ultimately aid his leader’s downfall, played by Alistair Campbell. I often thought there was great scope for a New Labour Rigoletto with that pair and possibly Prescott as a lumbering Sparafucile. But the opportunity passed by.

However, when Andrew Lansley started putting forward his health reforms, with the Lib-Dems performing U-turns on a daily basis I realised that the music and story fitted the current administration just as well.

Switching and the Smart Energy Market

Back in 1776 Adam Smith made the observation that England is a Nation of Shopkeepers (although Napoleon usually gets the credit for the phrase). If either were alive today they’d probably reconsider and point out that we’re now a nation of Switchers. Nowhere is that more true than our attitude towards energy suppliers. According to OFGEM, over 76% of us have switched our energy supplier in the last ten years. Around 26% of us do it every year.

For some reason, we love switching. Our favourite TV adverts are for comparison sites. One – the advert for Compare the Market uses a family of animated meerkats which have become so popular they’ve spawned a range of merchandise. Whether it’s insurance, energy, mobile phone plans, broadband or saving plans, we’re addicted. And nowhere more so than with switching energy provider.

It’s not just the websites urging us to do that. Government ministers keep on telling us that to get the best energy price we should switch suppliers. Their message is not to use less energy – just change supplier. And part of their plan for smart metering is to make it even easier to switch – as often as once a day. It’s creating a very interesting dynamic for the industry, but one that is about to change.

Making the NHS a Global Brand

The current debate about the future of the NHS starts with a correct observation, which is that continuing in its current form is untenable. As the population ages and we get more complex treatment regimes, then, unless we change our approach to healthcare, the numbers don’t add up. But all the Government’s proposed reforms are doing is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. I’d like to suggest something more radical, which is to think about how to make it self-funding, without increasing the strain on the public purse. Not by privatising it, but by extracting value from it and then exporting that value. In other words, let’s see if we can make the NHS a global brand and turn it into something that can generate revenue.

Before you dismiss it, stop and think. We’ve already done it with the BBC, which Superbrands rates as the fifth strongest brand in the UK. The BBC is respected and earns money around the world. Why don’t we think of the NHS in the same way? It doesn’t feature in any list of brands because nobody thinks of it like that. But there are some very good reasons why it should, particularly if we want it to be affordable in the future. The current Government (and every one before it) is missing a trick.

The NHS probably contains more data about treatment and outcomes than any other medical institution in the world. And so it should. For much of its life it’s been one of the world’s largest employers, accumulating detailed information on generations of the UK’s 60 million citizens. That’s an awful lot of “big data”. So here’s the question – “If we could extract and monetise that value, could we make the NHS pay for itself?” We need to extract that value and use it, then export the resulting expertise to make money from the rest of the world.