Doing 10 times more with 10 times less is how we are going to save the planet, and how many public and commercial sectors will survive too. And it is all about massive IoT.
The only reason massive IoT hasn’t truly arrived yet is that it wasn’t technologically or commercially viable before now. And the benefits of massive IoT – as the means to achieve 10 times more with 10 times less by being 10 times smarter – aren’t an optional ‘nice-to-have’ either.
Every commercial and public organisation in the world will need to deliver 10x more with 10x less over the next decade in order for their business and the whole planet to survive. Preventable waste and inefficiency will have to become fragments of a pre-massive IoT past. But there just hasn’t been a viable path to massive IoT before in a way that there is now.
All over the world massive IoT projects are being trialed and explored in a vast range of industries and sectors. One example is electric energy utilities. The shift to green and renewables is vital for the planet, but it is also a shift to a much more unreliable and uncontrollable source of power generation (solar, wind, tidal) compared to (say) an old-school, coal-fired power station.
To keep the power on, energy utilities have to accommodate once-unthinkable levels of variability in their power grids. Successfully managing this will demand not just knowing how much power their customers are using, but how much power their customers are likely to want to use – with even better predictive intuition than their customers might have themselves.
The shift to green energy is a shift to massive IoT. And it will be the same story in hundreds of other industries and sectors. Massive IoT is coming and it’s here to stay. Because once a few companies and organisations successfully pioneer massive IoT in their operations, the 10x more / less benefits will be so compelling that their competitors and peers will immediately want – or even be forced – to duplicate.
Which means, sticking with our previous example, that a forward-looking energy utility in Australia, for example, might be the first to show the world, both developed and developing, how to truly make green energy supply reliable.
Stumbling blocks
Massive IoT is any machine-to-machine (M2M) communication installation that scales to millions, and then billions, and one day trillions, of connected IoT sensors and device ‘things’ at densities of a million devices per square kilometer. These ‘things’ are compact, often battery-powered, products with limited energy, computing, and memory resources. That makes their connectivity requirements challenging and unique.
At such scale massive IoT inevitably enters the world of massive data. This will inevitably fall into the the domain of AI and edge computing. And although these are fairly new concepts to many industries, I am convinced that these will not be stumbling blocks when properly packaged into well-designed user interfaces and device management platforms.
The stumbling block, until now, has been the physical wireless connectivity network required to connect the IoT sensors and devices that collect the massive IoT data. There have been admirable proprietary attempts, but I struggle to see a long-term future for these because if a business is going to bet its future on any technology, it needs to know that technology will be there decades from now.
And that requires standards and large muti-vendor ecosystems. No commercial or public entity is going to invest millions if not billions of dollars in a technology only one vendor can supply and support. It’s risky to the point of reckless.
Which is why the future of massive IoT is now in the hands of two complementary 5G standard wireless IoT technologies that were built from day one to support massive IoT low power wide area (LPWA) networks: cellular IoT and DECT NR+.
Cellular IoT
Cellular IoT it the IoT-targeted LPWA version of cellular wireless technology. From 4G, and now in 5G, this comes in two flavors: LTE for Machine-Type Communications (LTE-M) and Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT).
Although a long time in the making (it was included in Release 13 of the 3rd Generation cellular wireless technology standard in 2015 by the 3GPP grouping of seven telecom standard development organisations), this power-optimised version of cellular has now well and truly arrived. It offers near blanket global geographical coverage ‘out-of-the-box’ and was designed for massive IoT scaling from the get-go.
LTE-M and NB-IoT offer the same reliability and security benefits of cellular worldwide, but at long-distance power consumption levels that support multi-year operation from small, light-weight batteries in a way traditional cellular cannot match. This means almost anything can now be connected to the world’s cellular networks without a gateway.
In industrial IoT, for example, it means the ability to monitor everything from the location and contents of shipping containers and key industrial assets, to how well plant machinery is operating and the likelihood of failure (from small tell-tale changes in vibration, for example).
The ‘downside’ of cellular IoT is that having access to a ubiquitous, secure, reliable, global network that already exists doesn’t come for free. A big part of the security and reliability is that your device has to be certified for operation on the network. And the data you send will have to be sent via an established carrier. All that means cost and a certain degree of complexity. But the costs and complexity are falling all the time. And I believe cellular IoT will become a mainstay of massive IoT in the future where global connectivity is required.
DECT NR+
While 4G provided a platform for cellular IoT, 5G is the first radio standard defined with truly massive IoT in mind. DECT New Radio (NR)+ (originally called ‘DECT-2020 NR’) is the world’s first non-cellular wireless technology to become a full 5G standard (under ITU’s 2020 International Mobile Telecoms 5G document).
DECT NR+ is an entirely new wireless technology from the DECT Forum – a group dedicated to developing and improving DECT which stands for “digital enhanced cordless telecommunications” to reflect its origins in the DECT telephone world of the early 1990s.
For me, DECT NR+ fills the gap in the LPWA network market that proprietary alternatives have before now addressed. Namely: if you don’t require global operation and instead only need to operate within a geographically-defined area, then enterprise IoT and public customers can now build their own ‘private’ network that supports low-cost data. Example use cases include asset tracking, smart city, and smart energy.
DECT NR+’s 1.9 GHz operating frequency is a global, license-free spectrum allocation (with the current exception of Japan, India, and China). It forms a single, secure, and reliable radio standard that is future-proofed and scalable. Moreover, because it is license free, DECT NR+ incurs no data charges, making it cheaper to run than its licensed equivalents.
With DECT NR+ users can deploy their own private networks. Private networks that use some of the proven technology that underpins the highly secure and ultra reliable global cellular infrastructure. As such, the technology promises to democratise 5G wireless by allowing massive IoT deployments with all the benefits of cellular, but at a much lower cost.
Managing the massive
In summary, I predict that over the next decade hundred-million-unit-plus IoT deployments will become routine across the globe.
And ‘no choice’ is what massive IoT will become to countless applications in hundreds if not thousand of industries over the coming decade. Massive IoT is going to completely transform how we live, work, and play in ways unimaginable to us today. And in doing so, it make the world a better, safe, greener, healthier, and ultimately better place to live.
Svein-Egil Nielsen is CTO/EVP R&D, Nordic Semiconductor at Nordic Semiconductor, a leading supplier of Bluetooth, cellular IoT, Wi-Fi, and DECT NR+ chips.
