NEW DELHI: India is leapfrogging from being a mere ‘internet’ market adopting disruptive technologies like ‘Internet of Things (IoT).’ This phenomenon is much like the transition happened from usage of basic mobile handsets to feature-rich smartphones, say experts.
“The IoT is widely accepted as the next big force that would drive mobility,” said Ashish Gulati, country head, Telit India adding, “Its power is in its promise to exploit the internet with a multitude of applications and products. This entails products across broad spectrum of the market and not just wireless and mobile applica tions.”
IoT is the hardware counterpart to the software “app” market and is unleashing a new wave of creativity around the globe. It allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, creates opportunities for direct integration between the physical world and computer-based systems, and results in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit.
“Entrepreneurs and companies can leverage IoT to build a business based on trends like the humanization of technology, increasing embedded and secure intelligence, and smarter energy use to conceive new applications and markets,” Ashish said.
With technology becoming smarter, enabling it to sense the environment and communicate through the mobile devices, by using smart-power, delivering exceptional power efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the network expansion will continue to drive growth for years, he added.
The IoT is going for a big leap now because of pervasive wireless connectivity worldwide, smartphone availability, residential broadband penetration, multi-year coin-cell battery life, energy harvesting, inexpensive low-power embedded-processing capabilities, sensor fusion, IPv6 availability, and cloud computing that effectively make us part of the network.
According to experts, IoT has a great potential to revolutionize fields such as healthcare, automobiles, personal appliances and industrial equipment. Through intelligent machine to machine communication (M2M) and Radio Frequency identification (RFID), equipments and devices can record and exchange data, process information and generate machine commands.
Driverless cars are a great example of IoT in action, wherein the car collects real time traffic data from GPS to navigate the best possible routes and also communicates with other cars to avoid collisions.
This existing infrastructure simplifies many development problems and lets innovators focus on some of the most important challenges facing today’s society.
Still, even with this solid foundation, many challenges are complex to be solved by technology alone, even though it is clear that the deployment of IoT technologies will be an essential part of the solutions, Ashish added.
Analysts predict the next revolution in consumer technology will be connected devices and has the potential to enhance the quality through seamless connecti vity.
Bright future ahead: Gartner
Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30% from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. In 2016, 5.5 million new things will get connected every day. It also estimates that IoT will support total services spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22% from 2015.