THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS||Tech wise
THE TECHNOLOGY OF INTERNET OF THINGS
In starting to define the Internet of Things, we compared it to the earlier
concept of ubiquitous computing. We could compare that, in turn, with Bill
Gates’s famous vision in 1977 of “a computer on every desk and in every
home” (http://danbricklin.com/log/
again with the earlier notion of a computer as an astonishingly expensive
and specialised machine, accessible only to universities, some forward-
thinking global corporations, and the military. It is worth taking a little time
to look at the Internet of Things through a lens of the history of technology
to more clearly understand how and where it fits.
Technology’s great drivers have initially been fundamental needs, such as
food and water, warmth, safety, and health. Hunting and foraging, fire,
building and fortifications, and medicine grow out of these needs. Then,
because resources for these things are not always distributed where and
when one might like, technological advances progress with enabling and
controlling the movement of people, their possessions, livestock, and other
resources. Trade develops as a movement of goods from a place where they
are plentiful and cheap to one where they are rare and valuable. Storage is a
form of movement in time—for example, from harvest time, when food is
plentiful and cheap, to the following winter, when it is highly valued.
Information becomes key, too—hence, the development of language to
communicate technology to others. Travellers might pass on messages as
well as goods and services, and an oral tradition allows this information to
pass through time as well as space.
The invention of writing makes this
communication ever more important and allows, to some extent, human
lives to be preserved in words by and about writers, from the ancient
philosophers and poets to the present day. From writing, via the telegraph,
radio, and television, to digital information, more and more technology has
been about enabling the movement of information or doing interesting
things with that information.
But the other human needs we looked at haven’t ceased to exist, nor will
they. We still need to eat and drink. We still need light and warmth. We still
need love and friendship. We still need chairs, clothes, and shoes; means of
transport and communication; and ways to entertain ourselves. The shape
and details of all of these things will change but not the needs they address.
As technology has progressed, new categories of objects have been created:
in the electronic age, they have included telephones, radios, televisions,computers, and smartphones. As with most new technology, these devices
tended to start out very expensive and gradually come down in price.
Demand drives down prices, and research leads to optimization and
miniaturisation. Ultimately, it becomes not just possible but also feasible to
include functionality that would previously have required its own dedicated
device inside another one. So although a television screen would originally
have physically dominated a living room, not only are today’s flat-screen
panels more compact, but the technology is so ubiquitous that a high-
resolution screen capable of displaying television content can be embedded
into a door frame or a kitchen unit, and of course, even smaller screens can
find their way into music players and mobile phones.
Similarly with computers, it has become so cheap to produce a general-
purpose microchip in devices that your washing machine may contain a
computer running Linux, the cash register at the supermarket may run on
Windows, and your video player may run a version of Apple’s OS X. But as
we’ve already hinted at, mere computing power isn’t a sufficient precondition
for the Internet of Things. Rather, we are looking at computing power linked
on the one hand to electronic sensors and actuators which interact with the
real world and on the other to the Internet. It turns out that the rapid
sharing and processing of information with services or other consumers is a
huge differentiator.
As an example, let’s consider the computers that exist in modern cars: they
have myriad sensors to determine how well the car is running—from oil
gauge and tyre pressure to the internals of your engine. As well as diagnos-
tics, computerized brakes may assist the driver when the processor spots
conditions such as the wheels locking or spinning out of control. All this is
local information, and although the processing and analysis of this data may
be highly sophisticated, it will be limited to whatever your car manufacturer
has programmed. But perhaps your car also tracks your location using GPS:
this is external (although not necessarily Internet-related) data. High-end
cars may communicate the location back to a tracking service for insurance
and anti-theft purposes. At this point, the car carries computing equipment
that is able to not just passively consume data but also to have a dialogue
with an external service. When your car’s computer is connected to the
Internet (regularly or permanently), it enables services such as responding to
traffic conditions in real time by rerouting around them. Your GPS might
already supply such data, but now it can be created in real time by “social
route planning” based on the data aggregated from what other connected
drivers nearby are doing. When the previously internal data gets connected
to the Internet, the ways it can be processed, analysed, aggregated, and
remixed with other data open up all the possibilities that we’ve seen in
existing connected areas and indeed new ones that we can’t yet imagine.
So there is a real change to an object or appliance when you embed comput-
ing power into it and another real change when you connect that power to
the Internet. It is worth looking at why this latter change is happening now.
When the Internet moved out of academia and the military, with the first
commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) opening for business in the late
1980s, the early adopters of the consumer Internet may have first gone
online with a computer running an Intel 486 chip, costing around £1500, or
around the price of a small car. Today a microchip with equivalent power
might set you back around £0.50, or the price of a chocolate bar. The rapid
rise of processing power, and the consequent cost decrease, is not a new
insight: it is widely known as Moore’s law (the rule of thumb, suggested by
the co-founder of Intel, that says the number of transistors you can fit on a
silicon chip will double every 18 months).
However, the kind of price difference we’ve mentioned isn’t merely a
question of degree: it is a qualitative as well as a quantitative change. This is a
“long tail” phenomenon through which we have now hit the right price/
performance sweet spot that means the cost of the computing horsepower
required to talk to the Internet has fallen to a level where adding a network
or computing capability is akin to choosing what type of material or finish to
use—for example, whether to use a slightly more expensive wood veneer.
Either option would add a little to the cost of the product but could also add
disproportionately to its value to the customer. When Internet-capable
computing cost thousands of pounds, this wasn’t an option, but now that it
costs tens of pence, it is.
So the price of computing power has come down to affordable levels, but this
is only part of the story. Manufacturers of electronic products have started to
incorporate general-purpose computer CPUs into their products, from
washing machines to cars, as they have seen that it has become, in many
cases, cheaper to do this than to create custom chips. The wealth of pro-
gramming and debugging resources available for these platforms has made
them attractive to hobbyists and the prototyping market, leading to the
proliferation of the microcontrollers,
Internet connectivity is also cheaper and more convenient than it used to be.
Whereas in the past, we were tied to expensive and slow dial-up connec-
tions, nowadays in the UK, 76% of adults have broadband subscriptions,
providing always-on connectivity to the Net. Wired Ethernet provides a
fairly plug-and-play networking experience, but most home routers today
also offer WiFi, which removes the need for running cables everywhere.
While having an Internet-accessible computer in a fixed location was useful
to those who needed to use it for work or studies, it would often be monopo-
lized disproportionately by male and younger members of the family for
general browsing or gaming. Now that the whole family can go online in the
comfort of the living room sofa or their own room, they tend to do so in
greater numbers and with ever greater confidence.
We hope the reader will excuse the preceding generalisation. As
shown in the following figure, computer use in the UK between
genders for the 16–24 age group is near identical since 2002. For
the 55–74 group, there is a clear gap which persists, despite
increasing take-up for both genders, until a tipping point around
Science_ICT/). Our hypothesis is that the shift is due, at least in
part, to processing power and connectivity becoming cheap, widely
available, and convenient. Not entirely coincidentally, these are
the same factors we suggest help give rise to the Internet of Things.
UNECE statistics on gender and computer use.
For situations in which a fixed network connection isn’t readily available,
mobile phone connectivity is widespread. Because the demand for connectivity
is so great now, even embryonic solutions such as the whitespace network are
available to use the airspace from the old analogue TV networks to fill gaps.
Another factor at play is the maturity of online platforms. Whereas early web
apps were designed to be used only from a web browser, the much heralded
“Web 2.0”, as well as bringing us “rich web apps”, popularized a style programming using an Application Programming Interface (API), which
allows other programs, rather than just users, to interact with and use the
services on offer. This provides a ready ecosystem for other websites to
“mash up” a number of services into something new, enables mobile phone
“Apps”, and now makes it easy for connected devices to consume.
As the online services mature, so too do the tools used to build and scale
them. Web services frameworks such as Python and Django or Ruby on
Rails allow easy prototyping of the online component. Similarly, cloud
services such as Amazon Web Services mean that such solutions can scale
easily with use as they become more popular. In Chapter 7, “Prototyping
Online Components”, we look at web programming for the Internet of
Things
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