Sponsored By
During the Huawei Connect 2016 conference last year, John Hoffman, CEO and director of the GSMA, said he believed that the convergence of cloud, IoT and big data would open the doors to a new world of opportunity. Here's what Hoffman had to say:
The mobile industry is aligned behind the very common purpose of connecting everyone and everything for a better future. And cloud will have a significant role to play in executing this vision. People and businesses are having access to multiple sources of data, analyzed in real time. It will allow them to make better decisions and help support a number of the United Nations' sustainable development goals. In particular, progress towards zero hunger, good health and wellbeing, affordable and clean energy, and water.
The total addressable market for the mobile network operators in 2020 is expected to be some US$1.1 trillion. Very important for this conference, almost half of that, some $413 billion, is expected to come from the Asia-Pacific region. There is no doubt that cloud is real, and it's huge.
The convergence of IoT, cloud and big data will deliver a real step-change. With billions of devices being connected in the IoT, more data is being collected, stored and analyzed than ever before. And cloud will be the glue, the glue that brings the IoT and mobility together. IoT devices will use cloud platforms to gather and analyze big data, which can be connected and converted into monetizable business intelligence.
For example, a security motion sensor is triggered in your house. Information is sent to the cloud. The user platform notifies the end user, and an alarm has been activated. You can then access your house via CCTV to see what the issue is. You notice that it is your cat. It's activated the sensor, and it's a false alarm.
With this type of information, sensors can be adjusted to prevent those false alarms, and the information shared with others throughout the system. So you have a solution that becomes more intelligent, and the information that is more valuable for the device manufacturer and the solution provider and the wider community. It's a win-win situation and scenario for all. A real closed-looped learning solution, all enabled by the cloud.
Next page: Use cases include better wine
Smarter cities: In some parks and schools, water flow control is provided by timers that are linked to automated valves. The irrigation system delivers the single amount of water used each day, with little regard to the weather forecasts or how much precipitation has actually occurred or is needed by the landscape. This results in wasting precious resources and large amounts of money. In some locations, up to 60% of urban water consumption is used for outdoor irrigation, and of that anywhere between 30% to 100% is wasted. Using a cloud-based big data computing system, we can calculate the water needs, enabling huge resource and financial savings.
Mobile operators are developing new low-power, wide-area networks for a range of industrial and agricultural applications. It gives us more productive cows. This technology will be utilized to monitor large herds of cattle over substantial swathes of farmland. By connecting the cattle to the cloud, the farmers are able to understand more about their livestock -- when the animals need to come in for the season, if there is a problem with the herd, or environmental triggers for disease outbreaks and productivity. This will increase the yield, and animal welfare. If we expand a little bit, the concept of farm-to-table quality tracking is a real, near and possible solution to enhance our foodstuffs around the world.
Automotive is arguably the biggest growth area for IoT connections. Gartner predicts that by 2020, one in five vehicles will have some form of wireless connectivity. In a recent report AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) said in the US it connected more cars than phones, with more than 1 million new connections early this year. We heard from Glenn Lurie at Mobile World Congress Shanghai that AT&T is very bullish on connected vehicles and cars. Typical in-car services include telematics, navigation, remote diagnostics and in-car infotainment. But it is not simply in-car connectivity that is driving the explosion of valuable data and accessibility to the cloud.
On-vehicle sensors, combined with roadside historical data, allows vehicles, allow OEMs, local governments and traffic agencies to predict and form accident hotspots, feed real-time data to drivers, and ultimately make the road experience richer and safer. And as Bill Ford from Ford Motor Company, an automobile company, said in his keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple years ago, the vehicle holds the greatest potential to network machines together for societal good, safety, security and for a better environment. Truly, the cloud is going to transform the automotive and transportation issue.
And now for my personal favorite: better wine. Agriculture is faced with significantly increasing costs in production, with declines in selling product prices and the need to reduce pollution and save energy. By connecting crops, soil and environment sensors to the cloud, farmers are able to understand much more about the crop welfare, when to harvest, how to avoid disease or pest infections. By collating data in the field, analyzing and forecasting, and by utilizing the cloud, farmers can get bigger crops, avoid crop failures, and target much bigger and healthier yields from their farms.
These four simple examples may not sound life changing. But trust me, they will be. All are powered by the cloud-enabled IoT future.
The GSMA, via its Connected Living Program, is helping operators add value accelerate the delivery of new connected devices and services in the IoT market. The three main focus areas for the Connected Living Program are big data, mobile IoT, lower-power wide-area networks and smart cities. The Big Data project helps operators establish an IoT big data ecosystem through the delivery of harmonized data sets and APIs. The Mobile IoT project is working with mobile operators and ecosystem partners to develop and accelerate to market low-power wide-area network solutions using licensed spectrum. And the Smart City project is working to highlight joint deployment approaches and deliver IoT enablers for smart city solutions that will deliver long-term benefits to businesses and citizens.
As we evolve the network to better serve the IoT, part of the mobile network evolution is low-power wide-area networks. Key features are low-power, low-cost devices with long battery lives measured in years, deployed in challenging locations, for example in basements and away from power sources. As experienced, trusted providers of managed M2M solutions, mobile network operators and their ecosystem partners are best placed to support this evolution and extended their reach to the full range of IoT applications.
The mobile industry has accelerated the standardization and deployment of LPWA networks, using licensed radio spectrum, to make reliable, secure and scalable solutions available later this year and in 2017.
Analysts, and some of our speakers today, have highlighted that security is a significant inhibitor to the deployment of many new IoT services, potentially exposing the ecosystems to fraud and attack on a daily basis. We have seen examples in the media recently, particularly in the connected car market. So the essential security must be designed into the IoT solutions from the very beginning, including cloud platforms, to prevent access to end points. Many service providers may see the particular security requirements as being unique to their market, but they are not. Almost all IoT services are built using end-point devices and service platforms and components containing similar technology.
Mobile network operators are in a good position to become the service providers for security because they have the experience in securing data and connections globally. To help solve the security problem, the GSMA has created a set of security guidelines for the benefit of service providers, including cloud providers, who are looking to develop new IoT solutions. These guidelines provide advice and recommendations to secure devices, service platforms, and networks as well as answering frequently asked questions. Security must be paramount as we move to the cloud.
The IoT presents a vast opportunity for all of us. And the convergence of IoT, cloud and big data will make a real step-change, allowing the IoT to fully realize its potential to meet the needs of businesses and consumers around the world. To ensure trust in the new applications and services created by the IoT, security must be at the heart of everything that we do.
Mobile network operators are best positioned to be your partners in the delivery of these services. There is a huge opportunity for all of us stakeholders to step up to the benefits of the world of opportunities that the cloud-enabled IoT represents. As we heard in the opening, cloud is connection; cloud is sharing. The GSM Association (GSMA) and our membership thanks Huawei for convening this program to discuss and debate the IoT cloud. I wish you a good day. Thank you!
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation
