Internet of Things News of the Week, March 3, 2017

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Former FCC chairman joins board of IoT co: Former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler joined the board of Actility, a company that has raised $25 million to build a low power wide area network for the internet of things. The company is building partnerships with satellite providers, carriers and others to offer the right type of connectivity for the task at hand. (Wireless Week)

Much ado about 5G: I thought I would spend an essay in this week’s newsletter on Mobile World Congress, but it all boiled down to a bunch of announcements about IoT gateways and 5G. Most of these 5G announcements were a lotta hype that reminded me of the lead in to LTE back in 2008. So, I’m putting this article from The Verge here because it does a good job explaining the reality. Call me when there’s a network and devices for it. (The Verge)

Related. The 5G specs were announced: The specification calls for a 20 Gbps downlink and a 10 Gbps uplink at each mobile base station. In practice this will be shared across devices connecting to that base station. When it comes to the economics of cellular technology the thing to look at is spectral efficiency. That’s a measure of how much data a carrier can transmit through a single hertz of spectrum. This concept may become less meaningful for IoT because many of those use cases don’t require a lot of bandwidth. This could once again decouple the prices set for data from the cost of delivering it, but increased competition may actually make that unlikely. For spectral efficiency, the 5G spec calls for 30 bits per hertz for downloads and 15 bits per hertz on the upload. Is the future 5G going to be faster than your home internet? usave list the best broadband packages so you can find the best suited deal for you. (Ars Technica UK)

Alexa will soon be a marketing vehicle: Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar explains how the payments company is thinking about how to market on the internet of things. What’s interesting is how he’s thinking about weaving an ad into a service as opposed to content. This makes sense when content pales in comparison to new digital services. (Ad Week)

Digital Lumens gets into building management: Digital Lumens makes a system of light mounted sensors and has entered into business with many companies as a smart lighting provider. Now it has launched a platform of other services based on its sensors. Customers can get occupancy data, temperature and humidity data and more from Digital Lumens. This is similar to a program launched last year by rival Enlighted. (Digital Lumens)

This is cool tech: DARPA is researching ways to reduce the power consumption of sensors so they can last for even longer. The Near Zero Power RF and Sensor Operations (N-ZERO) program is covered in this article, which discusses how it might benefit other connected devices. This isn’t going to be a tech for everyday sensors, but rather for those that would be triggered infrequently, such as fire detection or even leak detection. (Signal)

Private 4G networks are a thing for IoT: This profile of an Irish startup building private 4G networks got me thinking about how IoT is upending the traditional economics of a data network. You used to want to serve as many people as possible with a large-scale network that was good at a wide variety of things. Now, it feels like dedicated networks for highly customized use cases are leading to a huge variety of options and business models. And if the large carriers are the Intels of general purpose networks, then Ericsson seems to be popping up as the ARM by providing a network as a service. (Silicon Republic)

It’s a new IoT gateway! Dell has released a slightly less brawny IoT gateway this week and is celebrating the two-year anniversary of its IoT Group. (SDXCentral)

Two IoT case studies in medicine: This story shares two uses for IoT in medicine in one place. The first is using smartphone microphones to diagnose and monitor patients who have COPD, a lung disease. Is this IoT? I am on the fence, although it is certainly useful. The second case study is about how Boston Children’s Hospital created a Waze-like service for people who want to navigate the confusing corridors of the hospital campus. (IoT News)

Case law for the IoT: Remember the police who wanted a suspect’s Amazon Echo data as part of a murder investigation? This article delves into some of the legal arguments and implications if Amazon is forced to turn over the data. (Popular Science)

This concept car from Samsung Artik and Peugot is wicked: I don’t know if the idea of the car as the new living room is a thing I’m excited about (I think it will look more functional much like air travel is today) but I want to believe that a self-driving car attuned to my needs and connected to all of my cloud services is the future. (Wired)

Check out these events: I have been trying to create an event page on my web site for a few weeks, but in the meantime, Andrew Thomas, the CEO of Skybell has done an excellent job grabbing a list of conferences dedicated to the IoT. Check it out. (Inc)

This survey is far more optimistic about enterprise IoT: Last week I covered an Economist and ARM survey of the internet of things, suggesting that companies were surprised at how slow adoption rates have been. This week, Aruba, part of HPE, suggests that companies are much more optimistic. This survey of 3,100 business leaders suggests that 85% of them will have some kind of IoT deployment by 2019. However, like the Economist survey, the respondents in this one are also concerned about security. (Aruba Networks)

Can Intel be an AI winner? My former colleague Derrick Harris suggests that Intel, which missed mobile and seemed like it might miss AI, may have lucked into a hot area of growth: building the right kind of chips for doing machine learning on connected devices. (ArchiTECHt)