By Alex Hertel, Co-Founder & CEO of Xperiel
Considering the media hype and billions of dollars invested in the Internet of Things, it may surprise you to learn that IoT doesn’t actually exist -at least not yet. Today’s IoT includes around 25 billion connected devices, and this will triple to 75 billion by 2025. However, it’s still in its infancy and lacks the most important key capabilities that made the regular Internet such a powerful, thriving, and civilization-changing phenomenon. This is a big problem because it’s keeping the IoT from reaching its full potential.
Put simply, the Internet of Things isn’t a NET, but rather a bunch of THINGS connected superficially to the REGULAR Internet. This may not seem like a big distinction, but actually, it makes all the difference in the world. Just because we have smart devices such as thermostats, baby monitors, doorbells, light switches, and wall sockets connected to the Internet doesn’t mean we’ve created an Internet of Things. That’s because current IoT devices aren’t baked into its core, but instead, are just attached haphazardly at the peripheries of the network. We have an IoT that looks like the network shown to the left below, whereas a true IoT looks more like the network beside it on the right. In particular: The WWW is a true frictionless network because any web page can easily link to any other web page. With the IoT, it’s simply not yet the case that any device can easily “link” with any other device.
Major, world-shifting technologies take time to develop. The regular Internet evolved over almost forty years. During the 1980s, Bulletin Board Services (BBSs) primitively connected a few computers at a time using noisy dial-up modems over existing telephone lines. Next, our corporations and governments built specialized Local Area Networks (LANs) in their offices. Finally, the TCP/IP protocol-based ARPANET was married to HTML, giving rise to the World Wide Web. The WWW is the network’s application layer, and this was the key innovation that spread like wildfire across the globe to create the ultimate Wide Area Network (WAN), also known as the Internet.
Those of us watching the IoT’s birth can see an almost spooky degree of history repeating. The IoT is currently at the BBS stage of development, allowing us to connect a couple of “things” together in a 1:1 manner — just as an IoT baby monitor connects a screen and camera over the Internet. Similarly, the Nissan Leaf lets users check the electric car’s battery charge and control some basic functions through the NissanConnect℠ app on a smartphone, again connecting two devices in a 1:1 BBS way. Current IoT devices are really just using the Internet as a kind of glorified extension cable rather than as a true frictionless network. On the WWW, any webpage can hyperlink to any other webpage, and the corresponding just isn’t true yet on the IoT, and that matters a lot because it means that the IoT actually isn’t a true network but rather is just piggybacking on the regular Internet.
Today we’re just entering the LAN era of the IoT. With Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Homekit, these companies are working mightily to take each house and turn it into a “LAN of Things” where a centralized voice-controlled service manages various networked devices to automate our homes. By the time the LAN of Things takes hold, the IoT’s evolution will have caught up to the regular Internet’s evolution circa 1990. But it’ll still be premature to call it the IoT because for that we need to reach the next stage, namely the “WAN of Things”.
So how do we achieve this final stage of the IoT’s evolution? To answer that, we should first understand some of the things that the WAN version of the IoT can do which aren’t possible on its limited LAN and BBS predecessors. Let’s start with a simple example: Instead of just connecting our homes, the true IoT will connect the whole world and let us take our preferences with us wherever we go. For instance, when you check into a hotel and walk into your room, your mobile device will seamlessly and automatically communicate with the room and command it to adopt the preferences from your own home. The thermostat and lighting will automatically change to your settings. Your favorite music will start playing. The TV will turn on and change to your preferred channel, and your favorite art or family photos will be displayed in the room’s digital picture frames.
When you visit a restaurant, the IoT will be a step ahead. Even if you’ve never been there before, your mobile device will have merged with the restaurant as you walked in and told it your dining-related preferences so that you’ll have a better experience. How did the maitre’d know your name and that your favorite table is on the patio? Because the screen at his podium automatically told him. A customized menu will be brought to you on an iPad, ranking items you’re likely to enjoy higher than those you won’t, as Netflix does with films today. If you’re vegetarian or lactose intolerant or allergic to peanuts, it’ll call out those items or cross them off the menu entirely.
When you go for your morning jog, your IoT-connected wristband will give you an air mile for every mile you run. If you set a new personal best time, your phone will buzz, and the local juice bar will reward your achievement with a free healthy drink.
These are all things that can’t be done at the Google Home / Amazon Alexa / Apple Homekit LAN level because they’re not global. The WAN IoT will be much, much more powerful, and it’ll change human civilization the same way that the WAN version of the regular Internet did.
But none of this is possible without the key breakthrough that made the Internet thrive: an application layer like the WWW that is bundled with the right standards, protocols, tools, and programming languages like HTML and Java. History needs to repeat here as well, and the IoT needs an analogue of the WWW which allowed every person and business to easily create a homepage. Right now there’s no way for the long tail to do that on the IoT. What we need is the Real World Web, or RWW, along with an analogue of HTML which empowers millions of people to quickly, cheaply, and easily build their corner of a fully-connected IoT.
Once we have this, rather than making 1:1 connections like the IoT is currently doing, any device will be able to communicate with and control any other device, and the Internet will truly push out to create a digital fabric covering our physical world. We’ll be able to connect to everything wherever we go and take our preferences with us in a secure way that protects our privacy. The WAN IoT will be much, much more powerful than its current predecessor — and it will change human civilization and many aspects of our daily lives the same way that the WAN version of the regular Internet did.
But until then, it’s still premature to call the current IoT a true Internet of Things, and it won’t reach its full potential until we do.
The co-founder and CEO of Xperiel, Alex Hertel is an inventor who completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Toronto and is an expert on the use of immersive technologies to make the physical world digitally interactive. He previously co-founded Walleto which was acquired by Google and became Google Wallet.
