Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionising how we live and how businesses operate. IoT technology improves efficiency, provides new and faster insights and enables companies to make better-informed decisions. IoT ecosystems are the vehicles that make the ‘things’ of IoT – the sensors or devices – smart by providing connectivity with other ‘things’. Without connectivity, IoT is composed only of the ‘things’ and the innovation, and so the efficiency and improvements IoT delivers cannot be realised. Now, as IoT connectivity matures to support the era of massive IoT, there’s a need for connectivity procurement and for management to be simplified and streamlined, and to offer greater flexibility. After several false starts, 2023 increasingly looks like the year in which IoT connectivity will be made easy, and that will be of enormous benefit to IoT organisations of all types, writes James Schlebusch, the national sales manager at Quectel Wireless Solutions South Africa.
The benefits of connecting a device are well understood in terms of how it accelerates decision-making, reduces the total cost of ownership, and enables a closed loop of innovation to make better products in the future. However, IoT organisations have been hampered by the need to design connectivity into their devices, decide which type of connectivity to select, and then make deals with connectivity providers – typically telecoms carriers – to support their devices in various locations. This has required complex contracts, confusing billing, and fragmented approaches to international or global coverage.
The data processing side is arguably further advanced than connectivity but still requires simplification. A big driver for the demand of IoT has been the need for better integration in sectors that depend on sensor-based measurements and monitoring systems. Adding to this is the convergence of technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and connectivity, which are driving growth and interest across all areas. Data may be the byproduct of an IoT ecosystem, but it’s also what enables IoT to deliver value.
Data on its own can be a burden and a cost because of the storage and computing power it consumes. Analytics therefore is the way to make sense of the vast amounts of data that IoT produces, converting the raw data into vital, actionable insights which is key for customers to develop market leading products. The application of AI and ML helps achieve predictive analytics and other outcomes which make data valuable. Often, these can be fed back into IoT, creating a circle of continuous improvement.
What is clear is that data analytics and connectivity must continue to become simpler and clearer to provide IoT organisations with an accurate picture of its costs per device and the likely sources of profit. 5G and AI are the innovations that turn connectivity and data infrastructure into revenue-generating capabilities, rather than cost centres.
The statistics setting out that billions of devices will be connected and how businesses are using IoT to transform agriculture, optimise fleet management, improve warehouse management and a host of other industry applications, have all been seen and heard. Everything from connected cows and soil sensors in agriculture to critical applications in healthcare or uninterrupted cold chain logistics have been witnessed. IoT technology has risen to the challenge of these use cases, and this has opened the doors, enabling a smarter world.
The combination of low latency, high bandwidth, and secure connectivity offered by cellular connectivity in the form of LTE and 5G, and advances in edge computing, data analytics, ML and AI, mean IoT is now about far more than a sensor that pings some data to a central location. Device data is continuous, highly granular, and it can be always available.
5G technology standards for broadband cellular networks can support high data transfer rates with ultra-low latency. 5G will enable wireless carriers to compete with traditional cable and ISPs, providing equivalent connectivity performance with the convenience of traversing countries and regions.
AI is also specifically relevant to IoT. The data produced by AI algorithms is incredibly valuable to a wide array of business cases and functions. The goal is to create more efficient IoT operations, improve human-machine interactions and enhance data management and analytics. AI can improve businesses and their services by creating more value out of IoT-generated data.
Despite this, an agriculture business is still focused on crop yields and factories are focused on optimising production, so they do not have the time, resources or interest in becoming connectivity or AI experts themselves. They don’t want to build all the skills needed to design and develop IoT devices, procure connectivity, specify cloud capacity or master data science platforms. Instead, they want to buy these services and systems in the knowledge that they are optimised for its use case, competitive on cost and easy to scale up or down as demand dictates. Being able to get to market quickly with certified solutions is the icing on the cake.
Customers designing IoT products have long been interested in consolidating the number of vendors that are involved in its deployments. Dealing with many vendors for components, devices, antennas, connectivity and software – and ensuring each can integrate with adjacent functions – effectively takes time, costs money and comes with a significant administration burden.
Quectel’s Connectivity-as-a-Service has been established to support customers to access the connectivity they need to operate the devices effectively. In addition to providing the fundamental requirements of reliable, robust and secure connectivity, the customer can draw on Quectel’s expertise in IoT modules and antennas to package together module, antenna and connectivity. This will accelerate procurement, simplify the business relationship, and ensure smooth operation of pre-integrated components and services, freeing up resources for customers to focus on their core business.
IoT devices are getting more efficient at processing data with a requirement to process the data as close to the source – the edge – as possible. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) allows IoT data to be gathered and processed at the edge, rather than sending the data back to a datacentre or cloud. This means the data from IoT devices is processed at the edge to minimise the bandwidth needed to move data, while avoiding possible delays to data analysis.
At Quectel, smartness is viewed as not only being faster – it is about using fewer resources and taking innovative approaches to IoT connectivity and energy. Working cleverly is much more efficient than just working hard, and the smarter world Quectel is building is designed to help improve the status of all across society.
For its customers, that means relying on Quectel to bring them the tools they need to build the smarter world. In the past that has centred around GSM and GNSS modules, and Quectel is confident that its world-leading product portfolio contains an ideal module for all customer devices. Quectel still supplies the modules, but also supplies antennas, connectivity and design, testing, certification and ODM services that are needed to move forward at speed and even to out-accelerate innovation.
The future of IoT is endless. As its usage globally continues to grow and more devices have the ability to be connected, the module hardware and network capabilities will also continue to develop and expand.
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