Over the past 30 years the mobile industry has evolved from a fragmented, vehicle centric, low volume, high priced, business focused service, into a global mobile broadband business that has created new industries, new use-cases, billions of customer and innovative devices. The variety of mobile devices is about to explode as the mobile industry moves into what could be described as the third wave of Internet connectivity - a world where billions of “things” are connected. The next few years therefore promises to be as exciting and potentially as disruptive as the past 30 years.

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The Internet of Things to 2020
Over the past 30 years the mobile industry has evolved from a fragmented, vehicle centric, low volume,
high priced, business focused service, into a global mobile broadband business that has created new
about to explode as the mobile industry moves into what could be described as the third wave of Internet
1. Introduction: Faraday’s vision
Inside the Royal Institution at 21 Albermarle
Street, London, outside the theatre room
named after him, hangs a copy of a lithograph of
Michael Faraday delivering a Christmas Lecture
in 1856. Many consider Faraday the father of
electromagnetism, and those that followed him
– Maxwell, Hertz, Thompson and many others
– owe some of their success to the experiments
Faraday conducted in the nineteenth century.
from Faraday’s initial experiments to reach the
current mobile broadband connected society,
which is about to get a whole lot more connected.
Faraday would be astounded to see how far we
havetakenhisinitialideasandhowmuchfurther
we are about to travel.
In this paper, we look at how we have developed
the power of electromagnetism to build devices
that can communicate with other devices, with
each other – in otherwords, the Internet of
Things – and how this next phase of connectivity
is expected to evolve and develop over the next
2. The Potential for IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT), or the Internet of
connected everything, is at the cusp of stella
growth, suggesting billions of devices will be
constantly connected to the web and potentially
every other device. Forecasts for the number of
connected things range up to 50 billion by 2020.1
Even estimates from conservative research
companies place IoT devices over 25 billion.2
That, is explosive growth.
We should not doubt that we are becoming a
totally mobilised and connected society. Without
doubt the driving force behind the IoT is the
information to support intelligent decision-
making and for some applications, autonomous
to use the IoT concept to develop devices that
provide new kinds of services and applications
to extend the utility of mobile connectivity.
While some ideas will underpin fast-growing
and very large businesses, others may never
catch on – as is the nature of technology. Much
of the innovation in IoT development is coming
from new start-up companies – up to 30% of
new IoT products are expected to come from
3
BI Intelligence
reported in 2014 that investments in IoT start-
ups saw a 77% CAGR between 2010 and 2014,
which suggest venture capitalist companies also
see opportunities in the IoT space.
2.1. What will the IoT look like?
The real question is not if, or even when, but
how the fully connected smart intelligent
society will impact our lives. What devices and
applications fore instance will be central to this
smart connected movement?
The best way to look at this is through examples.
The smart home
A garage or shed door motion sensor that only
broadcasts a message when opened would
warn the homeowner of access. The idea could
be expanded to your wine fridge, your front
door, or the windows in your house. A discrete
monitoring camera that can be placed anywhere
in your home, alarmed via a smartphone app,
take images based on a movement sensor and
could upload those images to the cloud helping
deter burglaries.
1. Cisco IoE Forecast 2015
2. Gartner IoT Forecast 2015
3. https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/funding-for-iot-startups-has-soared-this-year-2014-11

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Smart tags on your valuables could warn
you if they were moved or left the house,
protecting your goods. Smart sensors, for
CO2
anywhere, powered by batteries and informing
this kind of application are clear. Every year in
the UK around 200 people are hospitalised with
suspected carbon monoxide poisoning usually
from faulty home heating, leading to about 40
deaths.4
Low-cost smart IoT smoke detectors that can be
placed anywhere in the house could warn home
owners of their status on a daily basis ensuring
they were always fully operational and could
send an alarm to one or more smart phones if
activated. In the US between 2007 and 2011
present at all and 23% of deaths were caused by
present but failed to operate.5
Retail and tracking
A network of static, connected ‘beacons’ that
can communicate with people or other moving
thingscanformthebackboneofawholerangeof
IoT applications – perhaps initially in retailing.
This application area is at the beginning of
its growth curve, with multiple retail trials
currently in place. Retailers currently don’t
know when their customers enter their retail
premises, only when then are at the checkout
and use their loyalty card. Beacons offer the
potential to engage with customers throughout
their shopping trip, enhancing the overall retail
experience. No more searching for those pesky
money-offcoupons–themostrelevantandupto
date offers could be sent to your smartphone as
you enter the store and redeemed automatically
when you pay, (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: How a beacon-enabled local retail offer service could work
4. http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/carbon-monoxide-poisoning/Pages/Introduction.aspx

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and medical garments that are designed to
incorporate multiple sensors to track heart rate,
blood pressure, body temperature and other
biometric measurements. These devices will
link to a smart device, like a smartphone and
then often to the cloud to provide users with
intelligent analysis of their data.
These IoT devices could be joined by smart
jewellery that could interact with an app on
your smartphone: an interesting emerging
application. Imagine jewellery that changes
based on your biometric activity.
Research from Cisco indicates that the number
of wearable devices is already growing rapidly,
and that an increasing proportion is expected
to have cellular connectivity embedded in the
future, (see Figure 2).
Clothing that monitors health and medical
conditions is a growing segment that will
deliver information that will help us make more
intelligent decisions about what we eat and how
we live. Letting patients go home early wearing
an IoT medical garment will free up hospital
beds while still enabling medical staff to monitor
their patients remotely.
Wearable technology will be a large market
driven in part by the insurance industry that will
be looking to manage corporate and individual
Beaconscouldchangethewaybusinessesengage
with their customers and this idea extends
beyond the retail world into wider tracking
and information management. Although some
privacy and intrusion questions may still need
to be worked out, beacons do have the potential
to transform how data is shared in an enhanced
smart information society. Did the security
guard actually pass this way on his rounds?
Which workers are in which areas of the site?
When was the last time the washroom was
checked? Is an employee entering a hazardous
area? Which of my children are at home? Where
did my cat go last night?
And those tags that we spoke of in the smart
home context? Well, many other applications
that emerge if you can tag things that you want to
that communicate with a central hub. The hub
things are. Or in a hospital, checking where the
nearest vital piece of medical equipment is, or
the closest specialist. The possibilities for tags
are endless.
Wearable technology
At the personal IoT level, the most popular
watches usually referred to as the wearable
segment. This segment also covers smart
Figure 2: Forecast for the number of connected wearables to 2019 [Source: Cisco VNI 2015]

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health policy costs and risks. The car insurance
sector is already using in-car monitoring to offer
reduced rates for careful younger drivers. It is
not a huge leap for insurance companies to want
to monitor employee health so they could offer
reduced corporate health cover – providing of
course that the employee base is above average
health.
from adopting wearable health technology in the
Companies would want to promote a healthier
workforce to keep health insurance premiums
low and reduced days lost to sickness and could
provide gym membership support, provide
healthy option restaurants, or even order in
healthy employee lunches and arrange lunch
Employees would gain from a better
and employees could even pay for or subsidise
health-related wearables.
health “status” of the company prior to investing?
Possibly. The health of a company could mean
more than one thing in the IoT future – and
impact valuations.
A smarter, better environment
The smart connected information society is an
extension of the mobile broadband network,
which in itself has come about due to the success
oftheWorldWideWeb.Wenowhavefasteraccess
to relevant information (some would suggest
lots of trivial information as well). IoT devices
will bring an additional layer of information to
the Web and mobile internet.
Air quality is one example to consider. Cities
like Beijing, London and San Francisco can
only deploy a limited number of expensive air
quality stations. This equipment does provide
very accurate data on a range of pollutants in
the air around the station but has to average the
data across other dispersed air quality stations.
Weather stations suffer from a similar cost-of-
deployment issue.
The solution could be small, personal IoT
sensors that we carry with us, or attach to
our home, or place in our garden, creating
a crowd-sourced network of sensors that
increases the granularity of the data already
collected.
In the weather station scenario, tracking
where it is actually raining based on real-
time information from garden connected
weathersensorscouldincreasetheaccuracy
of weather forecasting. Forecasts could be
broadcast via beacons to mobile devices.
2.2. Characterising the opportunities
IoT devices and applications can be divided
into two main segments: personal/consumer
on the one hand, and business on the other,
where applications also revolve around instant
access to data or the sharing of relevant data to
others. As we have seen above, many interesting
applications are emerging that make use of
wearable connected devices and beacons.
Figure 3 shows how some of the applications we
have described make use of these two enabling
technology ideas.
It may sound unlikely, but if companies can reduce
insurance costs by providing healthier options for
be reduced. It does sound like a win-win situation.
The wearable technology trend from insurance
companies also extends beyond the workforce
and into the boardroom. “Key man” insurance
premiums may require senior executives to also
report on their health and be required to wear
health-related products. Will the investment
community want companies to report the physical

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3. Technology, cost and deployment
considerations
The easier the deployment and use, the better
the experience and the lower the total life cost
of IoT devices, the more likely large market
volumes will be achieved.
The oft-used adage of keep it simple will
be paramount for most IoT deployments –
especially in terms of the user experience. We
have seen how well-designed user interfaces and
slick services that “just work” have been the ones
that have succeeded. The user experience of the
services delivered must take into account all the
nuances of privacy, intrusion, personalisation
and individual preferences. Some of the use
cases for IoT may sound a little like something
IoT services will fail to engage with customers
and could potentially turn society against IoT
growth.
Cost is going to be a critical factor in determining
whether IoT devices reach multiple locations
as required for different use cases. Cost is not
– a beacon for instance, or a sensor enabled
sports vest. The total cost of ownership will play
a major role in IoT adoption.
considered, as we detail below, with particular
reference to beacon-enabled and wearables
applications.
3.1. Power
If an IoT device needs its batteries changing on
a regular basis, or charging via a cable, some
IoT applications, especially in the consumer
segment, may be slow to grow. An IoT enabled
sports vest would require a hermetically sealed
battery – possibly using wireless charging or
energy harvesting technologies to provide input
to the battery system – that could be washed
out or charge barreries. These and other issues
need to be addressed for some wearable IoT
applications to reach its full market potential.
Beacon companies see huge potential in their
IoT segment but generally rely on batteries to
power their devices. Batteries can account for up
to 50% of the beacon device bill of materials and
may need changing twice a year – which can be
a huge manpower cost if thousands of beacons
need to have their batteries changed once or
even twice a year.
3.2. Connectivity choices
How IoT devices will connect with the mobile
broadband Internet will depend on the
application. A smart watch currently is an
extension of the user’s smartphone, making
it easier to check incoming texts, WhatsApp
messages and who is calling. Fitness bands
also connect to an application on the user’s
smartphone so that measurements, such as
heart rate or respiration, can be linked to
location data for instance. Bluetooth low energy
(BLE) is the usual wireless connectivity between
these devices. There is a battle going on to be the
device on our wrists and there is a reasonable
argument that checking your smart watch is
more user friendly than pulling your phone out
of your pocket every time a message or Facebook
A beacon can also broadcast a message over BLE
that is picked up by a smartphone application.
Depending on the application settings, different
actions are processed.
While BLE is the connectivity choice for many
IoT devices, in some situations, WiFi may also be
a viable alternative, in a smart home for instance
or when HD video needs to be transmitted. These
high-data-rate transfers may also require more
advanced wireless broadband data connectivity
such as 4G or even 5G. The downside here is that
these higher-power applications will need mains
power, whereas the potential for IoT devices is
in their ability to be deployed en masse without
the high-cost truck-roll that permanent power
entails. Batteries are the current majority energy
choice for IoT devices so low-power radio is
likely to be the main wireless communications
deployed – at least as far as a gateway with a
3.3. Data usage
ManyIoTdeviceswillonlyneedtotransmitsmall
amounts of data. A beacon for instance transmits

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sends heart rate data to a smartphone. An air
quality sensor may transmit pollution data that
is some tens of bytes in size every few minutes.
At the other end of the scale a personal video IoT
camera or a home security monitor may need to
stream HD, high-audio-quality video whenever
activated. In this case BLE or even WiFi may
not be the ideal wireless technology due to
the lack of quality of service (QoS), opening up
opportunities for mobile operators to provide
QoS connectivity via small home cells.
3.4. Spectrum
BLE has been designed for IoT but in unlicensed
spectrum and can suffer from interference if the
BLE devices in close proximity to each other.
There has been some industry discussion on
still a long way from a global or even a regional
agreement on this item. For the time being,
existing spectrum is likely to be used.
4. Conclusion
We are accelerating headlong into a wirelessly
connected smart information society. We will be
generating more data, requiring instant analysis
of this data and will make more intelligent
decisions based on this analysis. But the data
must be carefully processed. There will be a
growing need to manage and analyse the vast
amounts of “big data” we will be producing, and
services will spring up to help us distil from our
own data the knowledge that will help us make
more informed decisions – about what we eat,
how we exercise or how to avoid the worst air
pollution on our trip to work.
start of the slope of the adoption cycle for sensor
technology: expect multiple other sectors to join
the growth curve in the near future. We can
envisage many new ways that IoT applications
will impact our lives, but let’s not expect we can
see too far into the future.
Over the past 30 years the mobile phone has
evolved from a vehicle-centric business phone
to the largest consumer electronics device
segment in the world spawning the ring tone
industry, customisable phone cases, touch
screen technology and a multi-billion dollar
applicationsindustryalongtheway. TheInternet
of Things will be just as powerful in driving new
innovation in multiple sectors.
GSA will cover some of those industry sectors in
future IoT papers. In-building sensors and the
IoT smart home are two examples of the topics
to be covered. We will also dig more closely into
at least one IoT movement that is just gaining
traction.