Michael Barkway from TTP looks at the current state of play for the IoT without the hype and takes a look into the future.

The term Internet of Things, or IoT, encompasses everything from existing developments in machine-to-machine communications to the newest wearable devices. The vision of the IoT world is that every Thing is connected and discoverable from its own IP address, sharing information freely.

But will the future really be like this? There are good reasons to think that it won’t. This article analyses the nature of the IoT and sets out some of the challenges and opportunities for the next phase of its deployment.

The web today is mostly horizontal – pages of open information, with revenues derived directly through purchasing or indirectly via advertising. The cost model in the Internet today is many-to-one – many consumers to one web server. This has driven revolutionary change in social media, search, file sharing, media distribution and more, enabled by the low cost of managing individual connections.

In the IoT, each Thing carries a finite cost; a hardware cost to establish the device and a maintenance cost to resolve and maintain its connection. For the IoT, the cost model is many-to-many and the issue of who pays makes a pivotal difference.

This article will show how industrial applications will be driven by cost of ownership of devices and cloud processing of their output. Devices from lower-cost economies will take value out of the consumer market and the most successful home and consumer products will derive value from information instead. Standards will remain important, but will never fully displace custom radio protocols. We will also show that strong opportunities also lie in cloud processing and truly low-power monitoring.

Click here to read the full article by M2MNOW.

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