Tag: standards

The Internet of Things runs ahead of standards

As the Internet of thngs develops, industry standards struggle to keep up, leaving users at risk of being stranded with incompatible devices

A week or so ago we reported why LogMeIn’s CEO, Bill Wagner, wasn’t interested in participating in the Internet of Things industry groups as they are too bureaucratic and slow in a fast moving sector.

Last week I asked John Stewart, Cisco’s Chief Information Security Officer, about how the networking giant thinks about this attitude given Cisco is a key member of a number of IoT standards groups.

Stewart’s view is nuanced, “the notion of open operability versus standards is where the world needs to be. We’ve been pushing this notion of open interoperablity knowing that standards might take longer but yet you don’t want to create these islands of operational capabilities that need to be stitched together in weird ways. That would add friction to the world.”

“There’s not much room for non-interoperable systems as they would have to connect with something else,” Stewart added.

In this, Cisco’s Stewart agrees with Ericsson’s Esmeralda Swartz who believes device diversity will beat vendor’s attempts to lock customers into their IoT platforms.

While it may be true that industrial and smartcity technologies will be interoperable in order to work within complex systems, it’s highly likely many consumers devices will be locked into proprietary systems so vendors can monetize them.

For consumers, users and citizens the questions of interoperability and standards are going to be a pressing question as connected devices become common and in some cases unavoidable.

 

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Can diversity defeat vendor lock in?

Ericsson’s Esmeralda Swartz believes device diversity will beat vendor’s attempts to lock customers onto their IoT plaforms

Does the sheer range of vendors selling connected products mean the Internet of Things cannot be siloed? Esmeralda Swartz, VP of Marketing Enterprise and Cloud at Ericsson, believes the flood of devices entering the market place will keep IoT standards open.

Swartz spoke to Decoding the New Economy during her Sydney visit last month where she laid out Ericsson’s vision of the connected city.

One of the aspects marking Swartz’s and Ericsson’s view of the smartcity evolution is that for a connected community to succeed is that there needs to be a mix of large corporations, startups, community groups and government agencies working together.

That view is different from most smartcity advocates’ views which are either top down with the technologies being implemented by governments or bottom up with adoption being driven by startups.

Community groups are usually overlooked in the smartcity discussion so it’s refreshing, and possibly more democratic, to hear them being included in the conversation.

One area that isn’t missed in the smartcity discussion is security, something Swartz agrees with.

“With the IoT the attack surface expands exponentially,” Swartz says. “Security needs to be built into every layer at both the application and device levels.”

Along with privacy, standards are the other issue challenging the smartcities movement and Swartz is more relaxed saying, “the diversity of devices means it is hard to achieve vendor lock-in.”

“The nature of all these things that can be connected means you can’t connect all the layers without the connections being open.”

As we’re seeing in everything from cars to smart rice cookers, the race is on to lock consumers, businesses and communities into platforms. Many of the vendors are creating their own platforms to lock customers into their walled gardens.

If Swartz is right, then the market will defeat the vendors’ attempts to lock users onto their platform. That does seem though to be high risk for customers who may find themselves stuck in the grip of one standard or company.

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Towards the future mobile network

The 5G mobile communications standard is as much a vision for the society of the future as that of technology standards

What will the next generation of smartphones look like? Earlier this week the GSM Association released their roadmap for the future 5G network standard, the next generation of mobile communications that will start appearing towards the end of this decade.

The GSMA is the peak global telco industry body which includes amongst its membership most of the world’s telephone companies and the vendors who manufacture the network equipment, so the organisation’s view is a good representation of the industry’s long term vision.

Much of the future standard is actually an amalgam of existing technology and concepts such as heterogeneous networks where phones and mobile internet of things devices can switch from the phone network to private WiFi systems without users noticing the handover.

The GSMA sees eight main areas for the 5G standards;

  • data rates of 1Gbps down
  • latency of less than one millisecond
  • network densification in determining base station locations
  • improving coverage
  • making networks more availabile
  • reducing operating costs
  • increasing the field life of devices.

That latter point is particularly pertinent as battery life remains a major concern for smartphone users and getting power to internet of things devices is one of the greatest barriers to adoption.

With the 5G standard not expected before the end of the decade, it’s hard to imagine how much technology may have changed in that time, something the GSMA acknowledges; “Because 5G is at an early stage there may be many use cases that will emerge over the coming years that we cannot anticipate today.”

The report though does try to anticipate some of the applications we may see the 5G standard driving such as autonomous vehicles, cloud based offices and augmented reality technologies. All of these though are advancing rapidly under the existing fixed line, 3G and 4G telco networks.

For the moment rolling out the 4G standard remains the industry’s main game with the existing technology only making up five percent of the world’s mobile connections at present. This is the area the GSMA sees as being the big opportunity over the rest of the decade.

In another report the GSMA claims the 4G rollout in Europe, currently at less than 10% of connections but expected to be over half by 2020, will drive economic growth on the continent.

The mobile industry is playing a central role in supporting economic activity and recovery in the region, contributing 3.1 per cent to Europe’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013, equivalent to EUR433 billion4, including EUR105 billion generated directly by mobile operators. By 2020, it is estimated that the industry will generate a total economic value of EUR492 billion.

There’s no doubt telecommunications networks are to the 21st Century what the highways were to the Twentieth and the railways to the nineteenth. As with the construction of previous century’s networks one of the big challenges will be raising the capital to build the systems and making wise investment choices.

For the developing world raising the capital required for those networks might be the hardest task of all, however for those countries and regions not making the investments may leave them further behind the western nations than they are today.

Ultimately what eventually is included in the 5G standard will reflect many of the political and economic realities of the next five years; no international standard is free from political or commercial influences during its drafting. The job for the standards bodies is not to get left too far behind market or technological advances.

In describing a vision for the sector’s future the GSMA 5G report lays out many of the opportunities and challenges facing the telecommunications industry over the rest of the decade. With these technologies becoming the centre of our working and home lives, what happens won’t just determine what smartphone we own in 2020 but the shape of our societies.

 

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Electrocuting elephants – the cost of competing standards

We’re bad at setting standards but we have moved on from electrocuting elephants

A constant theme when new technologies appear is the inevitable war about standards that often sees bitter arguments over how the new methods should be used.

Over the centuries we’ve seen fights over railway gauges, video tape formats and even the shape of lighting conductors.

The struggle over lightning rods between the English and French camps in the eighteenth century was parodied by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels where the two tribes fought over which end of a boiled egg should be broken.

Probably the nastiest dispute in modern times was the battle over DC and AC electricity transmission between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, a fight made worse by Edison’s former employee Nikola Tesla taking his patents over to Westinghouse.

The fight became so fierce that Edison actually electrocuted an elephant to illustrate how dangerous AC electricity would be to householders.


Tesla and Westinghouse eventually won the argument, but it came at a cost to Topsy the Elephant.

While we may draw the line at electrocuting elephants in these enlightened days, we aren’t much better at settling standards. That’s why it’s fascinating watching how technologies like the smart car and the connected home will evolve.

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Silos and security in the internet of things

Is vendor lock in a bigger risk than security in the internet of machines?

Last week Deloitte launched its list of  500 fastest growing Asia-Pacific Technology companies.

At the Australian media briefing on the list and the company’s predictions for the telecommunications market in 2014 Deloitte’s Jolyn Barker and Eric Openshaw discussed the some of the implications of the report.

During the briefing Openshaw was asked about the risks of vendors creating their own Internet of Things standards to lock customters into proprietary platforms.

Openshaw isn’t convinced, “over time when technologies develop out of significant players in an attempt to create or extend a vertical stack, over time the market tends to revolt against that.”

“There’s usually one or two forces working against that, either the market revolts against it and insists on a new standard or the stack is too successful and regulators will come in and say ‘we don’t like your stack, dismantle it’ .”

His view is that in the long term issues of vendor lock-in and proprietary platforms fix themselves. “One way or another, these things can be problematic in the short run but typically over time they are resolved.”

Where Openshaw does see risks with  lying in the security of machine to machine technologies.

“The security aspect just can’t be overstated in terms of how important it is,” says Openshaw. “When we have demonstrations now of being able to hack a pacemaker, that’s a problem.”

“So the security issues on these networks is important.”

The interplay between the software, network protocols and security is going to be complex and may well be what makes or breaks some vendors products.

It’s still early days to fully appreciate all the risks with the internet of machines, but securing networks and devices will be one of the most important tasks ahead for the industry.

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Who will be the future Betamaxes?

A modern version of the video tape standard wars is being fought on our phones

This morning Paypal announced its PayPal Here service, a gizmo that turns a smartphone into a credit card reader.

On reading PayPal’s media release in the pre-dawn, pre-coffee light I found myself grumpily muttering “which platforms?” as the announcement kept mentioning “smartphones” without saying whether it was for iPhone, Android or other devices.

It turns out to be both Google Android and Apple iOS. It adds an interesting twist to the Point Of Sale market we’ve looked at recently.

The omission of platforms like Windows Phone raises the question of which platforms are going to go the way of Betamax?

Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS systems were the dominant competitors in the video tape market in the early 1980s. They were totally incompatible with each other and users had to make a choice if they wanted to join one camp or the other when they went to buy a video recorder.

On many measures Betamax was the better product but ultimately failed because VHS offered longer program times and Panasonic’s licensing out of their technology meant there were more cheaper models on the market.

A few days ago Bloomberg Businessweek listed the Betamax device as one of the “technology’s failed promises”

With a superficial comparison, Apple would seem to the Betamax while Google and possibly Microsoft are the VHS’s given their diverse range of manufacturers their systems run on and Apple’s refusal to license out iOS, which was one of the reasons for Sony’s failure.

But it isn’t that simple.

In the smartphone wars, it’s difficult to compare them to VCRs as the video tape companies never controlled content and advertising the way smartphone systems do – although Sony did buy Columbia Studios at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle in 1987.

This control of content is what makes the stakes so high in the smartphone and tablet operating systems war. A developer or business that dedicates their resources to one platform could find themselves stranded if that platform fails or changes their terms of services to the developer’s detriment.

Another assumption is there is only room for one or two smartphone systems; it could turn out the market is quite happy with two, three or a dozen different systems and incompatibilities can be overcome with standards like HTML5.

In a funny way, it could turn out to be Android becomes the Smartphone Betamax due to having too diverse a range of manufacturers.

One of the first questions that jumps out when someone announces a new Android app is “which version?” The range of Android versions on the market is confusing customers and not every app will run on each version.

More importantly for financial apps like PayPal Here and Google Wallet, smartphone updates include critical security patches so many of the older phones that miss out on updates pose a risk to the users.

In the financial world confidence is everything and if customers aren’t confident their money is safe or will be promptly refunded in the event of fraud they won’t use the service.

Whether this uncertainty will eventually deal Google out of the game or present an opportunity for Microsoft and other companies is going to be one of the big questions of the mobile payments market.

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