The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the largest in the world, with around 2,500 different performances taking place each day. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of three weeks, sells almost three million tickets and showcases some of the best performances from around the world. It also seems to attract the world’s worst sound technicians, who think that volume is the only thing that matters. So it was refreshing to find a couple of shows this year which highlighted the issues of hearing loss. Around a quarter of us will experience hearing loss during our lives, so it is important that people become more aware of how to protect their hearing, as well as understanding the consequences of hearing loss and for society to remove the stigma of wearing hearing aids.
When Smart Meters go wrong
Most people don’t think much about firmware – the embedded software which runs the microcontrollers in all of the devices we have around us. We’re aware of the frustration when they don’t do what they’re meant to, at which point we realise that “smart” may not have been the best adjective to use to promote the product, but even when they do go wrong, turning them off and on again, or taking the battery out generally clears the problem. They almost always go wrong because the design process didn’t include enough testing, or not enough time was given over to thinking about the “edge cases” – those unexpected combinations of events which result in things not working the way they should. Most of the time it’s just a short-term annoyance; if it’s worse than that we’ll probably send it back, or throw it out and buy a new one.
However, we do expect safety critical devices like cars and planes and national infrastructure to be a lot better designed than this. Your boiler turning off because it thinks there’s a flow problem when there isn’t is annoying (time for a firmware upgrade please, Vailant), but it’s not life threatening. In contrast, a self-driving car that runs over a cyclist is not something the public is generally happy about. Nor is a plane falling out of the sky. But where would you put a smart meter in the scale of things that might affect your life? Last week we found out, and it’s not a happy answer.
Understanding IoT Business Models or “Who killed my Unicorn?”
One of the memes that has been going around the industry this year, particularly amongst platform suppliers, is that the slow growth of IoT deployments is due to the fact that “Consumers don’t yet understand the real value of IoT”. It’s an incredibly arrogant statement, which tells us a lot about the current start-up mentality, where too many have the perception that they’re entitled to become a billion-dollar company just because they’ve had the presence of mind to jump on the IoT bandwagon. However, the fundamental fact remains that if you are going to succeed, you need a business model. Unfortunately, profitable business models in the IoT are rather thin on the ground, largely because many of the self-styled IoT experts don’t really understand the market.
What most people do agree on is that the IoT isn’t taking off at the rate which everyone had expected, although that’s no great surprise – technology growth curves almost never match the hockey stick curve that analysts predict. Gartner’s famous Hype Curve constantly reminds us that the path to ubiquity is strewn with failed ideas, many of which never emerge from the trough of disillusionment. The IoT suffers from a further problem, which is that the catch-all name has become to mean all things to all men (or maybe all machines). Many forget that the popular IoT poster children which the press pick up and promote as IoT are generally more fluff than substance.
Which brings us back to business models. The IoT will take off when companies work out how to make money out of it. Sadly, that’s proving harder than it may seem, with the more cynical concluding that the only people to profit from the IoT so far are conference organisers. So, let’s take a look at why developing a profitable business model is proving to be so challenging.
Forget 5G and the IoT – MWC 2019 was all about audio
Mobile World Congress is an odd event. It’s where the GSMA attempts to set the mobile agenda for the coming year, where major infrastructure deals are done behind closed doors and where the rest of the industry shows off its latest products. This year, the big message was that 5G is coming, whatever that may be. The IoT was relegated to something that’s mainly happening in China and the startup community. What I found interesting was that audio was far more prominent than I can recall in any of the last 30 years of MWC and its predecessor shows.
The IoT Value Stack
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If you listen to almost any conversation about the Internet of Things you’re likely to find that it fairly rapidly degenerates into a conversation about the communication protocols. Should you use Sigfox or LoRa? How about GPRS? GPRS has already been turned off in most of the US, but it could be around for another decade in Europe. Or what about NB-IOT? Or maybe it’s better to go for LTE-M? Not to forget the new radio that will be coming along in Release 15. Or is it Release 16?
Almost all of this is irrelevant. We already have enough low power, low cost communication standards to fulfil almost any IoT use case we can think of. The problem with the overabundance of ways to transmit data is that it diverts everyone from the more important (and much more difficult) part of the IoT, which is the rest of the value stack. This is the first of two articles where I’ll explain the wider IoT value stack and why we need to stop fixating on the comms. In this one I’ll go through the basics and then, in the second one, follow that up with more detail on security, the business models and the skills you need to succeed in the IoT.
How to Hack a Smart Meter and Kill the Grid
Last week was a watershed for the embedded security community, and by implication everyone else. Bloomberg announced that rogue chips had been found on the motherboards of servers sold by Super Micro Computer to companies like Amazon and Apple. Whoever had added these during the manufacturing process would have acquired the ability to control and access data from the servers when those companies installed them. For the first time, it appeared there was evidence that the supply chain could be disrupted. That meant hacking was happening during the manufacturing process, before the products had even left the production line.
Up until now, hacking has predominantly been viewed as getting malicious code into a device which is “clean”, by exploiting security flaws in its code. That’s what’s happened with every PC virus; attacks like the WannaCry ransomware, and state sponsored attacks such as Stuxnet and the recently discovered attempt by Russian hackers to infiltrate the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. Although the concept of hacking a product before it has shipped has been discussed for years, the Bloomberg report signals that we’ve moved from academic debate to reality.
There is still debate about whether the report is correct. Apple and Amazon deny much of the detail, but its publication has started people looking more closely at the supply line and concluding that whether or not it is true, the way we design, subcontract and manufacture complex electronic products today means that it is possible. If it is true, this attack was probably commercial, where a company or a state wanted to discover what leading global companies were doing. What is more worrying is the prospect of a future where malicious state actors target infrastructure with the aim of crippling a country. Which brings me to smart meters.