IoT to drive telecom revenues

By Nandita Singh

By 2020, the number of Internet-connected-devices are expected to be somewhere between 25-50 billion, globally. About 2 billion of these devices are expected to be in India, provided progress of visionary programs such as Digital India and 100 Smart Cities stay on course. Launched in 2014, these two programs could lead to massive expansion of the IoT industry ecosystem. India is betting big on it. IoT (Internet of Things), it is said, will enable India to leapfrog to the 5G era along with rest of the world, unlike almost a decade’s time lag in getting to mobile technologies 2G and then 3G / 4G.

Some of the key aspects of smart cities primarily including intelligent transport systems, smart water, energy and waste management, smart maintenance of cities and citizen services will drive the sensor-everywhere industry environment, enabling humongous data generation available for structuring and making it productive for human life.

There are a number of industry verticals where IoT use-cases are running in pilot scale demonstrating how automation is solving industry specific problems, and a number of early adopters are even deriving productivity gains from these pilots. India’s M2M roadmap was released in 2015, outlining the communication infrastructure framework. And the country’s first IoT policy is in the works and open for public consultation. Telecom Secretary J S Deepak, shared some details on it at the recent three-day IoT Congress organized by IET’s India IoT Panel in Bengaluru.

The IoT policy, it is proposed will be implemented via a multi-pillar approach. The approach comprises five vertical pillars including Demonstration Centres; Capacity Building & Incubation; R&D and Innovation; Incentives and Engagements; Human Resource Development and two horizontal supports -Standards & Governance Structure.

Deepak elaborated in his keynote speech at IoT Congress that significant amount of work is already through. The Registration guidelines and KYC norms for SIM embedded M2M (machine-to-machine) devices are close to announcement. “The team has come up with a 13 digit numbering scheme for SIM embedded devices for M2M. These will be different from P2P (person-to-person) communication,” he said. Defining these guidelines and standards are critical for the smart city program and Digital India to take-off. The Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC) and autonomous body Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI), are working to enable the IoT ecosystem with a view of encryption, privacy and security as well.

Recently, India also opened up the licensing for virtual network operators (VNOs), which will boost the IoT ecosystem and in turn fuel growth in telecom sector. IoT offers avenues for telecom operators and system integrators to significantly boost their revenues and in fact, has resulted in their taking lead in adoption of IoT applications and services being offered by the technology.

(Narrowband) NB-IoT to Lead

Earlier this year, telecom major Vodafone Group and Huawei came together to establish an IoT Open Lab in Newbury, UK to develop products and applications on Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) technology. First of the devices with applications on NB-IoT will reach market as early as January 2017. Huawei has been similarly working with Deutsche Telekom, China Unicom and Etisalat (UAE) since early 2015. At the recently concluded Huawei Connect 2016 Conference, in Shanghai, Huawei showcased its IoT strategy and industry applications, and how it is involved in setting up open IoT labs and promoting the development of IoT Standards with its global partners.

According to Jiang Wangcheng, VP of Huawei Marketing and Solution Sales Department, Huawei is committed to help telcos accelerate the commercial adoption of NB-IoT and maturing of the industry chain. The company announced the release of world’s first 3GPP-based NB-IoT commercial chip called Boudica. It will be a system on chip (SoC) that features high level of integration and ultra low power consumption. It can be deployed with lightweight Huawei LiteOS, providing a quick development channel for developers. Currently, most of Huawei pilots are running in the China market. The company expects large-scale commercial adoption to pick up in 2017, at the global level.

High collaboration with partners is the key attribute of the emerging IoT ecosystem. "The Huawei IoT platform offers open APIs so that any third party application can connect. Huawei LiteOS is again open source and offers open APIs to help partners develop IoT products with speed. And Huawei provides NB-IoT chips and modules for partners to integrate into IoT devices ensuring end-to-end IoT solution chain,” informed company leadership.

The industry broadly agrees on NB-IoT technology for enterprise applications ranging from utility meters, asset-tracking to sensor monitoring and has been working on it intensively, since last two years.

Tech Majors Join IoT Fray

While Huawei started making its presence in IoT noticed lately, another global technology major Cisco has been onto it for some years now. Cisco is also betting big on IoT. It was perhaps one of the first few companies to get on the Digital India bus in 2014. Anil Menon, Cisco’s Global President of Smart and Connected Communities, was in Bengaluru sharing details on turning Bengaluru’s landmark Electronic City into a smart City as a pilot for the rest of the country in 2014 itself. And a couple years before that, the company had showcased its intelligent building at Bengaluru campus -- with systems that recognizes users and adapts to their preferences and results into energy savings, optimum utilization and productivity gains.

In February of 2016, Cisco showcased scale capability of its smart traffic management solution at the iconic Amber Fort in Jaipur, in Rajasthan. Here the company was seen going after LoRaWAN, the low power wireless technology and Jaipur Development Authority had taken lead with its proactive approach, while other state governments in India were still deliberating on how to approach pitches for smart cities to the central government.

Menon had, in 2014, pegged the value creation at $15 billion for India by 2020. And India, in 2016, has hardly begun to even scratch the surface. According to analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, by 2020, globally, about 1.3 billion IoT devices will sit on cellular networks, generating $21 billion in connectivity-related revenue alone. The 3GPP standards organization has now accelerated ratification of LTE-based options (NB-IoT, LTE-M, 5G) that have the capability to get on to operator’s network seamlessly bringing down disruption uncertainties with Low Power WAN (LPWAN) unlicensed technologies such as ZigBee, LoRa, SigFox, Ingenu among others.

Earlier in mid-2016, following the 3GPP standardization process for NB-IoT, Ericsson announced a collaborative effort with Intel and China Mobile for the world’s first demonstration of IoT applications running over cellular IoT infrastructure showcasing end-to end connectivity.

Besides, apart from direct IoT applications, the IT industry also has an opportunity to provide solutions, services and analytics related to IoT.

Basically, Internet of Things, the IoT, involves three distinct stages: One, the sensors that collect data (including identification and addressing the sensor/device); two applications which collect and analyze this data for further consolidation and thirdly, and most importantly, the transmission of data to the decision making server after which big data, analytical engines are used for the decision making process. Needless to say, most value to be unlocked is in the decision-making capabilities that data analytics will provide.

Can there be better news for telcos and the IT industry in India?

Cognitive Era Dawns!

The future of IT / IoT is cognitive. The statement came from Sanjay Brahmawar, the Global Head & Managing Partner of Strategic Business Development at the IBM Watson IoT Project. According to Munich, Germany-based Brahmawar, every decision in the future will be made, aided by cognitive systems, in a unique partnership between machines and humans – where machines will augment the human effort. Given that his role involves talking to C-Suite professionals across verticals, globally, he sums up three big shifts that are driving the industry, while speaking at the IoT Congress in Bengaluru. “As far as IoT adoption is going, there are three dominant trends. One, the organizations are moving from exploration to transformation; two, access to new sources of data is going to be an enterprise’s competitive differentiation and third, IoT is now a C-Suite priority worldwide for improved performance, serving customers better and identifying and building new revenue streams,” he said, adding that 40% of all data will be IoT by 2020 with at least 30 billion devices on the network, globally.

The merging of the digital and physical worlds has just begun.