The telecoms industry has always been open to innovation and new ideas. The industry spends money and resources, encouraging incubators and innovators to develop new ideas in digital innovation. This innovation has seen incredible leaps forward since the advent of the Internet, with mobile devices becoming our ‘computer in our pocket’. According to research by comScore, in 2014, 60% of Americans used mobile devices for digital media access. The mobile industry collective, Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), are predicting that by 2020, half the world’s population will use mobile devices to connect to the Internet. This has quite staggering consequences for how we, as individuals, employees and as business leaders live and work. The mobile device, will literally, be our connection to everything else.
The market space for connected devices is buoyant making connected devices and data an even more interesting prospect for the telecoms industry. Machina Research has predicted that the global Internet of Things (IoT) market will be worth $4.3 trillion by 2024. This market growth and value is not lost on the telecoms industry. The paradigm shift being opened up by the IoT is giving the communications sector their latest playground and they are fully exploring its potential.
Little and Large: Using Small Devices to Connect to Big Data
One of the inarguable benefits of small devices, like a smart phone, is its portability. We already use them to store half our life on, from music, to videos, to email, to health apps, even handling our schedules and connecting to workplace networks; making phone calls is almost passé. So the mobile device has made itself indispensable and in doing so it has positioned itself as the obvious device from which to go to the next level, the IoT.
There are a number of communication industry initiatives taking place around the potential of the IoT:
Connected Living
‘Connected Living’ is a GSMA initiative. The GSMA recognize that with the advent of connected devices and the large amounts of data generated through these devices, that data can be used to improve lives and livelihoods. GSMA believe that the data collected from IoT devices will open up a landscape for new services and charging models. Connected living looks at how we can use IoT devices to improve our general living conditions. This includes improvements in healthcare, digitized transportation and more efficient energy usage. GSMA have split their initiative into two areas: “new revenue opportunities” and “cost reductions and service improvements”. For example, GSMA report that they expect ‘pay-as-you-drive’ car insurance to be worth around $2.5 trillion by 2020 through utilizing data analytics to usage based insurance (UBI) and underwriting. A report by AIG, has stated that IoT based sensors in cars could dramatically reduce the rate of deaths on roads – with 400,000 people a year dying in road related accidents in India and China, this is a technology that is overdue.
Digital Health Care Catalyst Project
This project is headed up by a number of communication industry providers. It looks at how to utilize health data, across myriad devices and new digital services to provide better healthcare. The group is bringing the wider healthcare eco-system pulling in all of the partners involved in a person’s healthcare, from nurse, to consultant, and ultimately healthcare insurers. The results can then be used to help improve the health and care package of the patient with the express goal of allowing that individual to remain living in their own home. Findings from an AIG report into IoT use in healthcare talk about how wearable devices can communicate data, in real-time, to physicians, making yearly check-ups obsolete and improving general health outcomes. The same report makes the observation that IoT devices allow us to use “actionable intelligence in the data they collect “. This intelligent use of data within a healthcare context, not only allows better healthcare decisions, but can mean improved efficiencies in critical supply storage, etc. It is this concept, of insightful and informative data that can be applied particularly well in healthcare.
Semantic Interoperability
One of the common complaints about the IoT is that rather than creating a common standardized universe, it is in fact generating silos of connected devices. Ericsson, one of the global providers of communications technology, is leading an initiative to try and redress this lack of standardization and improve interoperability. Interoperability improvements will be instrumental in creating a series of IoT eco-systems that Ericsson is hailing as being part of the acceleration of IoT. They describe these eco-systems as ‘Connected Clouds’ which bring together big data and analytics, from IoT connected devices, e.g. the Vehicle connected Cloud which links up all of the players in a vehicle eco-system, including the human operator, fleet managers, repair shops and insurance companies.
An Assured / Insured Future
The communication sector has recognized that they hold the keys to the IoT castle because they offer a natural medium to share data created by an IoT device or application. They already have a long history of working out the complexities of cross-jurisdiction and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. However, the IoT will bring with it a literal universe of data, in fact, according to AIG by 2020 big data will be connected across 40-50 billion devices. With all this big data being generated, making sense of it is paramount. Analytics can turn a nonsensical plethora of information, into an informative message, that can allow us to make predictions, have greater insight, and create better and more informed decisions.
The new era of connected devices, offers us a more assured and hopefully customer-centric view of the world. It can help us achieve greater health and smarter cities. We can use data analytics to improve on other aspects of our lives and work too. The use of big data collected through connected devices can offer us a way to model and predict risk, with the reward of more tailored insurance policies, an example being in usage based insurance that will positively impact all industry sectors. In a new report by AIG. ‘The Internet of Things: Evolution or Revolution?’, which looks at a cross-industry perspective of the IoT, it points out:
“…IoT will usher in a new economic era for the entire globe. The promises IoT holds are not simply improvements over existing processes and economic models; rather, they are transformational in scope. ”
Certainly, we are ready as a species for such change. We can no longer keep creating information in an unstructured manner. As Gartner put it in the, ‘Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016’ report:
“classification and information analysis techniques will bring meaning to the often chaotic deluge of information.”
Once we take control of these data we can use it to determine our risks. Our mobile devices may well become the hub of our IoT universe and the data generated through the device and apps held by the device, can give us a greater control of our environment, our work and our future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDCGkuvk2FE
Sources
https://machinaresearch.com/report/forecasting-the-internet-of-things-revenue-opportunity/
http://www.gsma.com/connectedliving/
http://www.ericsson.com/research-blog/internet-of-things/semantic-interoperability-internet-things/
http://archive.ericsson.net/service/internet/picov/get?DocNo=22109-FGB1010668&Lang=EN&HighestFree=Y
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3143521
https://www-160.aig.com/innovativetech
This article is the product of a partnership between RCR Wireless and member companies of American International Group, Inc. Although this post is sponsored, the information and opinions expressed in the article constitute only my own beliefs.
