iot

Five consumer technology challenges will decide who owns the future

6 January 2019 by Steve Blum
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Vegas cocktail

The innovation capital of Earth is Las Vegas for the coming week, as hundreds of thousands of technology makers and breakers, and buyers and sellers converge on the event formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Most of what’s on display is as boringly mainstream as clock radios and console televisions were at the first CES in 1967.

But there will be a handful of technologies and prototypes amidst the chaos that will offer clues to what our world will be in 2067, and that’s what I’ll be looking for…

  • New smartphone form factors – It’s an accident of history that networked, pocket-sized super computers are called phones.
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FCC wants to open 1,200 MHz of spectrum to unlicensed users, and that’s a lot

25 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission is considering a radical overhaul of the way licensed spectrum is managed, and shared with unlicensed users. Besides upping the stakes for wireless Internet service providers this week, the FCC began considering a plan to open up a massive 1,200 MHz slice of spectrum in the 6 GHz range to WiFi, Internet of things (IoT) and other new and unlicensed uses.

It’s a lot of bandwidth. The 2.4 GHz band originally used for WiFi is only 83 MHz wide, and the newer 5 GHz band is 150 MHz.… More

California IoT law requires manufacturers to build security into connected devices

9 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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A pair of linked bills passed by the California legislature and signed into law late last month by governor Jerry Brown require manufacturers to preload passwords or install other security features on any kind of device that’s directly or indirectly connected to the Internet, beginning in 2020. Assembly bill 1906, carried by assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin (D – Ventura) and senate bill 327, authored by senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (D – Santa Barbara) are aimed at protecting privacy, and preventing the rise of botnets – networks of online devices that are infected with malware and used by cybercriminals for their own purposes.… More

Fresno County grower quantifies IoT ag tech benefit

18 February 2018 by Steve Blum
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An agricultural technology experiment is underway in Reedley, in Fresno County. Fybr, a low power wireless networking company, is working with DaCapo Agricultural Corporation to determine whether Internet of things (IoT) enabled soil and temperature sensors and irrigation controls produce a real benefit, and if so, how much. So far, the answer is yes and significantly.

Fybr installed water, moisture and temperature sensors at different depths in the ground and temperature sensors in the canopy of a dozen plum and grape orchards, and flow monitors and valves in irrigation pipes.… More

Cable industry prepares for open competition in IoT services

29 July 2017 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full picture.

Open source and cable industry are terms seldom found in the same sentence. But that’s about to change and it might be a very big deal indeed. CableLabs is the jointly funded, common technical development organisation for the cable industry, worldwide. Its crown jewel is the twenty year old DOCSIS standard, which is the engine that drives data delivery over hybrid fiber-coax systems in the U.S., and most of the the rest of the world.… More

Verizon fires up mid-tier IoT network

1 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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Making good on a promise, Verizon says it is rolling out wireless Internet of things (IoT) service nationally. During the CTIA show in Las Vegas last year, a Verizon representative said that the LTE M1 standard would be deployed throughout its U.S. network by April. Verizon beat that deadline by a day, saying in a press release that as of yesterday, it was launching…

The first nationwide commercial 4G LTE Category M1 (or Cat M1) network, which spans 2.4 million square miles.

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SigFox plans California ag tech IoT network build out

27 November 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full deck.

Small bursts of data at infrequent intervals are sufficient for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. That’s as true in the agricultural technology sector as it is for urban uses, such as meter reading or environmental monitoring. AgTech, though, brings its own challenges and advantages to the party. On the one hand, there are fewer obstructions to block or attenuate wireless signals and spectrum tends to be less crowded. On the other, electrical power is often scarce and the realities of farming mean that anything you put in the ground often has to be temporary – fields are constantly being plowed up and replanted.… More

Salinas Valley preps for IoT development wave

24 November 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full deck.

Middle mile infrastructure is improving in the Salinas valley, with a quantum shift due early next year. That’s expected to help improve poor last mile broadband access, at least when compared to what the average California can expect to get. In a nutshell, that was the message I delivered to the Salinas AgTech meet up last week. You can download the presentation here.

The evening’s program was about broadband resources that could be available to support the development and deployment of Internet of things (IoT) applications, services and products in the region.… More

Smart policy has to lead smart technology to make a smart city

11 September 2016 by Steve Blum
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Nobody knows what a smart city is. Or rather, everybody defines smart city differently, depending on individual goals: it’s a means to an end.

For equipment makers and service providers, a city is smart if it buys their stuff. To a network operator, a smart city is one that hangs that stuff, whatever it might be, on its network. On the private sector side, the smart city vision is marketing driven and has a distinctly vertical focus – there was little or no interest in horizontal integration on display at the smart city panel sessions I sat in on at the CTIA show in Las Vegas last week.… More

New network standards fuel Verizon IoT push

7 September 2016 by Steve Blum
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U.S. mobile carriers will offer specialised Internet of things (IoT) services in a big way next year. Some of the motivation is competitive, the result of pressure from companies using unlicensed spectrum, but it seems to be mostly the result of new technology protocols for the LTE standard that support IoT applications and, critically, business cases.

Verizon announced its plans for full, nationwide deployment of a key IoT standard by April 2017 at the Telit IoT Innovation conference in Las Vegas yesterday.… More