You may have heard about the IoT, which stands for the Internet of Things. Despite the name, it’s not a separate internet for inanimate objects. It’s just the regular internet that you use, but that part of the traffic made up of smart devices talking to each other. It was first given the name by computer scientist Kevin Ashton back in 1999, way before it was such a part of everyday life.
This article is a quick, easy and non-technical introduction to what the IoT does, and how it’s a big help to almost everything we do. Here at BetterRoaming we know a lot about the IoT, as our parent company of 1GLOBAL is a big contributor to the technology and systems that make it all work.
Here’s an introduction to what the IoT is all about:
Who are the Things?
The Things in IoT are all your smart digital devices, the ones that can transfer data to one another without having to ask a human first. That’s not just your computers, phone or console, but anything with a sensor and a network connection it uses to swap data with other devices in real-time.
What are IoT devices?
Some of the Things which you might encounter everyday include smart home devices like thermostats and home security systems that get on with their assigned jobs without needing to be asked every time. For example, a thermostat that adjusts automatically based on the patterns of when you’re out of the house, or a doorbell that sends you a message when someone’s at the door.
Another example that is increasingly prevalent are Wearables. Smartwatches and health trackers like Apple Watch, Google Watch and FitBit connect to your smartphone to tell it how your biometrics are doing, as well as directly to the internet to track GPS location. Biometrics are not all that new, as many personal medical devices such as pacemakers have been using internet connections to monitor patient’s health for several years already.
Perhaps the most eye-catching new item on the IoT are cars that drive themselves. Self-driving vehicles rely on comparing all the information from their sensors and cameras to data on the internet to work out how to react to the road.
Types of IoT Devices
There are literally billions of Things now connected to the internet, exchanging data to better do their assigned jobs. They range from ovens that know when to warm up for dinner to smoke detectors that know who to alert to military-grade equipment that can tell good guys from bad guys. The Things in on the IoT are frequently divided into three types.
- 1
Consumer IoT
Generally, those personal and wearable devices that connect to the internet for your convenience, including your phone, which are often referred to as ‘smart’
- 2
Industrial IoT
These kinds of devices are often heavily involved in sensing or monitoring manufacturing processes, energy production and safety. An industrial IoT device could be keeping an eye on the temperatures at a factory, and making sure that anything dangerous was seen by the right people.
- 3
Commercial IoT
So how has IoT benefitted the commercial side? These are the tools and systems that help you at work. These are often used for recording and sharing data for reference, such as cashiers’ stations that automatically email you a receipt or medical equipment that makes sure patient records go to the right place.
How do IoT devices communicate?
All of the devices on the Internet of Things need an ‘IoT platform’ to manages how they send and receive their data across the internet, as well as monitoring the Thing’s hardware, software, and performance. An essential part of any Thing will be its sensors, sometimes called smart sensors, that let it work out what’s happening in the real world and convert that into data that other devices can understand and react usefully to. This could include temperature sensors, light sensors to monitor if a plant is getting enough sun, or motion sensors that detect movement by monitoring ultrasonic waves (which many voice-activated home assistants can now do.)
How do the Things Find Each Other?
As well as product name that regular people would use to identify an item, smart Things will also have a Unique Identifier (UID) that more accurately singles it out in an environment that might have hundreds or even thousands of other devices just like it. To humans, UIDs look like long alphanumeric or character strings. Once you might already have encountered is your home networks Internet Protocol (IP) address. If you’ve ever had to log on to your router and typed in 192.168.0.1 then that’s a form of UID.
How Do We Talk to the Things?
Most of the devices connected to the Internet of Things have an interface that we’re already familiar with, via our smartphones or wearables or personal computers. Recently, people have been able to directly get in contact with their IoT gear thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this context, the meaning of NLP is any voice-recognizing software -which is the technical way of saying that we can now just ask them out loud. Common examples of IoT devices using NLP technology are Google Assistant, Siri, or Amazon Alexa.
What does the Internet of Things Do?
By far the slowest element of any sequence of digital information transfer is when it has to go through a human. There is a joke among software engineers that the most unreliable part of a computer system is the bit that goes in between the computer screen and the chair. By making our decives smart enough that they can talk to each other without having to be told what to do by a person each time, IoT means devices work faster and cheaper with increased safety and productivity, and an overall improved customer experience. When you don’t have to be consulted every time the thermostat needs turning up or down, the amount of energy spent is hugely reduced. If you wait until a room is too hot or too cold, then not only is it uncomfortable but it requires extra energy to fix it. A device that warns a diabetic patient that their glucose levels are off is useful, but a device that also goes ahead and also remotely messages their doctor or carer can be lifesaving.
Things at Work
The development of IoT technology has had the biggest impact on business. Our smart networks at home might swap a little information on how to keep things clean and comfortable, but modern businesses collect and analyse massive amounts of data in real time via dedicated devices. A facility like an airport will have tens of thousands of sensors reporting to multiple specialist systems, all of which will be making automatic decisions about how to react and who to notify. Every time you interact with your bank, IoT devices will be investigating and recording the details of that transaction to make sure it’s legitimate and store it for your safety.
Taking Things Carefully
It's worth noting that the world of business has become so engaged and dependent on IoT technology that the internet has had to struggle to keep up. There are now so many devices talking to each other that the regular architecture of the internet, which originally just imagined people talking to each other, is straining under the weight. There are even digital commentators who suggest that the majority of all internet traffic has already become between devices automatically talking to each other, rather than human use.
Also, as with any technology, IoT systems when not handled properly can make mistakes faster than ever before. Organizations that want to leverage IoT technology absolutely require the help of experts like 1GLOBAL to maintain the confidentiality of the information we share over the internet and prioritize security measures.
Even Better Things Ahead…
At BetterRoaming, we can give you the benefit of one of the key technologies underpinning the whole Internet of Things : the eSIM. These non-physical SIM cards are embedded directly into smart devices, which eliminates the space and energy taken up by the old plastic versions. This allows devices to seamlessly switch between networks based on the strongest available signal, without manual intervention, and be remotely managed.
