Juan José González Menaya
Global Head of Telefónica M2M Managed Connectivity platform at Telefónica Digital
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing at a vigorous rate for a few years. All the actors involved in the industry, including analysts, estimate that this growth rate will not only remain steady but will even catch up even more speed in the future.
IoT applications are meant to become a revolution for the already-existing business areas: the self-driving connected car, smart homes, farming, handling and shipping of goods, security, smart cities, etc.
Technological revolutions are not possible without having to overcome technical challenges first. The first challenge for an industry, that aims to connect billions of objects, is to enable the infrastructure and communications networks that will be needed to provide connectivity to those things…
Solving this initial challenge does not require starting from scratch. There are already interoperable mobile networks deployed throughout the world. Up to this moment these networks were used mainly by people for mobile phone usage. Even though this may seem obvious, we will explain later on in this article the implications and challenges that connecting machines (instead of only people) have.
Mobile phone networks and SIM cards have been therefore receiving an alternative purpose to identifying and managing the connection of mobile phones in the last few years. The needs of connected things are very different to the requirements people have for using their phones in terms of speed, type of message, data volume, frequency, etc. Operators are thus constantly adapting mobile networks to meet this challenge of providing the best service possible to connect things, without forgetting the data-intensive use people give to their smartphones and mobile devices.
Click here to read the full post on the IoT Telefónica blog.
