I’ve often chided telcos for their IoT focus, not that they focus on IoT (they should) but on what aspect of IoT they choose. Talk to a telco about IoT revenue, I said, and you hear them talking about how much they could earn by selling cellular subscriptions to devices and not just to humans. That was a fair criticism, I believe, but my proposed alternative was for telcos to climb the service value chain, which they have proved unwilling or unable to do. Telcos are stuck in connecting things, and we’ve largely run out of plausible humans to connect, so I think that you can fairly argue that if 6G is going to actually earn more revenue for telcos, the only way it can happen is for the number of devices that use it to explode.
Light Reading notes, in THIS piece, that the problem with 5G stemmed from the failure to realize the IoT connections that were claimed for it. We have, today, roughly 4.7 billion cellular IoT devices according to my modeling (LR quotes Ericsson as saying 7.5 billion, but I don’t see that as credible). That’s a tenth of what a Cisco 5G cheerleader told us to expect by 2020. So sure, under-realizing device connection potential destroyed a telco pay-for-connections revenue plan, but that doesn’t address the question of whether telcos could have done anything to connect more devices.
Vendors, of course, always want to portray an exploding need for their product. Get your capacity in place right now, dear telco, or be swamped by a zillion sensors who will be demanding connectivity. Your competitors are already plotting how to divide up the sensor customers you’ll lose. The threat of IoT explosion was enough to serve vendor purposes. But why was this all hype and nonsense? Don’t we have real applications out there? It depends on your definition of reality.
I had a nice exchange with a public utility who used cellular connectivity for meter reading. They pointed out that the big problem with the notion that every metered service would evolve to use cellular-connected meters is that the cost of this transformation to and execution of an IoT strategy has to be significantly less than the cost of reading the meters manually. That cost includes the cost of the new cellular-linked meters, the cost of installing them, and the cost of the service used to connect them. This utility said that their meter-readers read an average of 600 meters per day, and the meters had to be read only monthly. For this utility, the cost/benefit of cellular reading was unsatisfactory. The point is that most of the hypothetical applications of cellular IoT are really extensions of simple transactional missions, which means that you don’t need the connectivity until you’re ready to generate a transaction. The thing that transforms the mission is the introduction of some process-control requirement. Suppose you want to be able to identify a customer whose usage rate is suddenly abnormally high, to avoid having something like a leak or short consume more than you’ll likely be able to bill, risk damage to a facility, or whatever? Suppose you’re going to manage usage in peak periods? Now it’s a lot easier to justify real-time connectivity, but those missions are a fraction of the total IoT missions today.
Rural areas pose a much greater challenge to manual reading, of course. One rural utility told me they could read only 10 meters per day per reader, and extensive vehicle use was required. However, they also said that they used their meter-readers for other missions, including inspection and replacement of equipment. This utility was very interested in RFID or “proximity” reading, where instead of having a call-home capability built into meters, the meter simply responded to a query issued by a reader that might simply drive past. Proximity automatic meter reading lets readers do thousands of meters per day, and the cost of a cellular connection is eliminated.
The point here is that everything that you could do in a theoretical, technical, sense isn’t necessarily going to be a smart thing to actually do. Marginal business cases rarely realize the full market potential of a technology, and encourage a search for alternatives, even non-technical ones or simply one that stays the present course, that can build ROI better. The best solution would be to find non-marginal business cases, but an alternative would be to lower the cost points for the stuff that’s already being considered.
The problem with Door Number Two here is that telcos can’t control all of the cost elements. Many of the 5G and proposed 6G connectivity options target what’s essentially a message-based service, whose costs would be proportional to the number of events reported rather than the number of devices, However, anything like this will lower telco revenues and impact the business case for the service-facilitating infrastructure investments. It doesn’t mean that the new sensors or their installation will be less costly. This sort of IoT, then, doesn’t seem to offer a real mass-connection opportunity.
So what might? Telco experts seem to be collecting around the potential offered by smart glasses, meaning AR/VR, and utilities are also interested. The two groups have different visions, however. Telcos see the glasses as being cellular-connected, where utilities see them as an extension to phone/tablet connectivity. The difference, the comments I get suggest, comes from targeting presumptions. Telcos seem most interested in seeing smart/connected glasses as an evolution of smart glasses, a pathway to device connectivity. Utilities see the glasses as tools in worker empowerment, facilitating tasks that are likely to involve smartphones already. For example, most utilities see the glasses as a means of linking a worker to diagrams/photos of complex equipment to guide operations/maintenance, and in these missions many workers also rely on smartphones to access reference material.
Consumer missions for smart glasses may be the most essential element in a 6G future, but not likely in the form that telcos seem to expect. I don’t think that smart wearables need to have their own cellular connections; nobody who depends on one would be likely not to depend on a smartphone even more, and the wearable is indeed a logical satellite to a phone. But visual integration between technology and the real world, tight and optimally useful integration, has to involve video both to capture reality and to communicate between the tech world and the real one. If telcos hope to sell 6G service to glasses, they need to come up with some realistic reason why a direct connection would be needed, and that’s true for IoT applications across the board.
