IoT Needs More Spectrum To Keep Speeds Up, Carrier Allies Say
As the Internet of Things gains traction and popularity, more spectrum needs to be used for wireless data, industry officials said in recent interviews, but they weren't sure just how much more will be necessary to keep things running smoothly. With the global race for 5G on, but at least 10 years away from a mainstream rollout, officials said the IoT can get by using LTE Advanced and LTE Unlicensed for a while, but eventually 5G will be necessary to keep up with coverage. 5G, the next generation of wireless networks, is in the prototype stage, with companies doing trials and demonstrating devices (see 1503040048). The IoT and 5G were topics at last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
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Spectrum and IoT are intertwined, said Scott Bergmann, CTIA vice president-regulatory affairs, so the recent AWS 3 auction and upcoming FCC broadcast-TV incentive auction are some of the ways that the spectrum needed to support IoT is being addressed. “There’s tremendous demand for spectrum [and] we need to be planning ahead for our spectrum needs,” Bergmann said. “It takes a long time to identify spectrum, to work to relocate the incumbent users or find alternate spectrums for them and then to auction that spectrum and then to clear that.” The federal government uses more than half of the available spectrum for mobile broadband, so if that were freed up for public use, it would increase the speed of connectivity for IoT, Bergmann said. He called spectrum policy an “unsung sleeper hero” in IoT development. He said more policies and flexible use are needed to make available more spectrum -- both licensed and unlicensed.
The IoT is a growing market in the wireless industry, with new connected products released regularly. While the future will see nearly every appliance in a house as well as cars and other parts of everyday life connected via the IoT, there is no need to wait until 5G is mainstream 10 years from now, said Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas: The “3GPP mobile wireless standards group continues to enhance the capabilities of the mobile broadband standards to address this growing market."
The way IoT runs now, a lot of devices don’t use a ton of data nor do they communicate a lot, said Chief Operating Officer Pat Wilbur of Konekt, an Internet startup that lets consumers buy access to 2G or 3G networks. Despite having a few limiting factors, the IoT's an area of future growth, Wilbur said. The IoT is expected to grow to 26 billion units by 2020, a thirtyfold increase from 2009, a news release from Gartner said. It said that IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion, mostly in services, in 2020. It will result in $1.9 trillion in global economic value-added through sales into diverse end-markets, the researcher said.
There will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020, estimated Sean Schneyer, Ericsson director-machine to machine solutions, North America. Ericsson is looking at everything that can benefit from being connected and finding a way to do that, he said. “You’re going to start to see things across multiple industries where these things can actually be leveraged both from a monetary perspective in traditional business as well as for the benefit for society.”
Jonathan Spalter, chairman of Mobile Future, said that sensor technology will connect everything, which will then be connected to the cloud, which will form the basis of communication. The data resources available at that time will unlock huge potential for invention and innovation, he said. “The Internet of Things isn't simply going to be a platform for things connected to things and people connected to things, it also will be a platform that will inspire untold amounts of innovations into our world and our human interactions with our world.”
Concerns surrounding the advancement of the IoT are focused on privacy and security as well as the support of this network of billions of devices, experts said. Although industry is inspired by what the system could be, the IoT is in its infancy, Spalter said. "It really is too early in the evolution of these technologies for legislation and other types of regulatory or policy intervention." Fred Campbell, executive director of the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology, said there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the entire IoT. Spectrum and IoT relate when it comes to coverage more than capacity, he said. “I don’t necessarily think the privacy concerns have to be addressed by government up front. They can be addressed through voluntary industry standards and the like, but I do think for people to be interested in these services, presumably they’ll expect privacy to be addressed.”