Cisco sees $14 trillion opportunity in IoT

3/14/2013 5:28 PM EDT

Well, now that the hype has crested at $14.4 trillion, we can all start knocking IoT as NOT the next big thing ;-)

3/15/2013 12:12 AM EDT

yeah, I'll believe it when I see it: Cisco heavily involved in low-margin products. Can you think of any company less culturally suited to being the $2 sensor in my flowerpot, or the fitbit/tracker in my cat's collar.

3/15/2013 1:04 AM EDT

14 trillion!! Is there that much money around us waiting to be spent on IOT? Many of world's problems could be solved in an instant with that amount.

I suspect, they meant to say billion not trillion!

3/15/2013 11:20 AM EDT

$14 trillion mentioned twice.. that cant be true.. you can be optimistic in your projections, but this is plain insane.. maybe its the Zimbabwean dollar.. :)

3/15/2013 11:25 AM EDT

Even if 50 billion devices by 2020 is a reasonable prediction, to generate $14.4 trillion in sales means an ASP of $288 per device.

Move the decimal place one position to the left and then the 50B unit volume might actually happen.

3/15/2013 11:36 AM EDT

I don't know that I could get behind such a pie-in-the-sky prediction as $14 trillion without some sound evidence to back it up.

No question about it, though. It will be a huge market with a huge impact on just about everything. There will be plenty of $2.00 or $0.50 mini systems in flower pots, cat collars, greeting cards and pretty much everything else.

But, as Mark stated, much of that probably won't be made by Cisco. A good deal of it will be assembled in some distant no-name factory where labor is cheap.

3/15/2013 12:50 PM EDT

The money won't be in the hardware, it'll be in the services provided.

I could see home monitoring subscriptions (like your alarm system today). Equipment service contracts. Cloud computing services to aggregate multiple sensor outputs and perform the necessary calculations that the low power sensors would not be capable of.

Definitely a solution looking for a problem, but if there is enough marketing hype, the problem will eventually be perceived.

3/15/2013 12:58 PM EDT

The only REALLY likely market to come out of all this is all those electricity, water and gas meters needing to be read automatically at low cost, if only because public utilities generally have easy access to the capital needed to fund large projects. (The electricity meter's needs are somewhat unique because it tends to merge somewhat with general power distribution management or the "smart grid".) However because the data rates needed AT EACH METER are quite low it's unclear how such a network could be done efficiently. Some have envisioned an all-wireless "self-organizing" system (with individual nodes acting as data concentrators) and that no doubt could be made to work, but why would each utility need to fund its OWN network? It's also not clear why smothering individual OSes with a "universal API" helps reduce costs,
if the need could be demonstrated then this industry needs more of its own "Android-like" platform to build on, but it's not clear that the demand exists for even that. Maybe it would make more sense to "build out" these networks based on existing utilities, maybe it would make more sense to envision other models, for example you might consider something that would look more like the old "pager" systems in reverse (ie a central system COLLECTING small amounts of data when polled), maybe even accessed through the existing cable TV or internet distribution access system. In any event a 14 trillion dollar market looks just about absurdly optimistic.

3/15/2013 8:10 PM EDT

I wonder how security will be provided for so-called "connect everything" IOT network. Nearly 20 years ago (long time, isn't it?). IPv6 designers included IPsec as standard feature for security, but IPsec is notoriously unpopular due to huge implementation diversity (=incompatibility) and difficult configuration.
Will "40Kbyte footprint" IPv6 stack support IPsec and IKEv2, or TLS1.0(likely, because SSL/TLS is selected for 6LowPAN architecture), or nothing at all?

3/15/2013 8:22 PM EDT

Always being wary around April 1st I double checked the veracity of this $14.4 x 10E12 claim. Numerous other news source also reported Mr. Lloyd's remarks - I thought perhaps he meant Billion with a B as in 10E9 - nope - seven other news outlets say trillion as well and surprisingly, none challenged it. So either this is "the mother of universally coordinated April Fools spoofs" or a new pinnacle of "irrational exuberance". Don't get me wrong, I think IoT will be a very important technology but fourteen trillion+ in a little over 6.75 years? Compared to that the market growth of the iPhone looks like a flat-line dud!

3/16/2013 7:20 AM EDT

Forecasting is a difficult art to pull off with credibility but there is little doubt that whether the M2M opportunity can add $1 trillion or $75 trillion to the economy it is inevitably going to be transformational. So instead of fixating on the numbers let's look at what the industry needs to do to realise the potential.

It needs a technology that is different to the legacy network infrastructures that exist today and one that is commercially and technically feasible. I'm going to argue that Weightless technology and the Weightless Standard are the keys to unlocking this potential. And I'll try to do that without writing a white paper into a comment field - there are resources on weightless.org to flesh out the arguments.

It needs a ubiquitous network infrastructure that offers price points per connection equivalent to PAN technologies such as Bluetooth, Zigbee & Wi-Fi but with the range of traditional 2G/3G/LTE technologies. And it needs to have been optimised from day 1 to address the specific needs of M2M that are fundamentally different to those for human communications...

3/16/2013 7:21 AM EDT

The Weightless Standard defines in explicit detail how this can be done using TV white space spectrum and a completely new protocol to deliver a low cost network (fraction of traditional cellular), low cost hardware at the terminal end (around $2), low power (a ten year battery life from a primary cell) and exceptional signal propagation characteristics deriving a range of 10km and excellent building penetration.

The availability of a very large amount of bandwidth in the very high quality, low frequency, globally harmonised and license free TV white space spectrum is the catalyst for this transformational change. Dynamic Spectrum Access, deployed geo-locational database resources for TVWS, carefully considered regulation, spread spectrum transmission, cloud based network architectures, lightweight terminal processing requirements and a protocol designed from the ground up to support the specific needs of machine communications are the building blocks.

Sounds like an unobtainable utopian Shangri-La doesn't it. Until you consider that the FCC has already legislated for it, silicon is available to support it, the Standard is due to be ratified in two weeks and globally over 600 Members of the Weightless SIG are already engaged.

Happy to debate either here or on the Weightless LinkedIn Group.

3/17/2013 5:58 PM EDT

Why do need to sprinkle sensors all over the planet except to pave the way for the new world order/Orwellian future? Are we developing the technology to enslave ourselves?

First we loose our privacy thru online databases (i.e. Big Data), now it's 24/7 monitoring in the physical world too.

Someone needs to slow this train down and think about the negative consequences.

3/17/2013 10:08 PM EDT

There has long been a vision of a future of ubiquitous computing in which ordinary processes are instrumented by ultra low cost low power networked nodes.

I believe some of this will come true eventually, but how much and when is very hard to say.

I suspect some of it may never pan out because the momentum of doing nothing or letting an analog/mechanical process stay in place is very great.

3/19/2013 3:22 AM EDT

we will have a migration strategy. http://www.hqew.net