Why the Internet of Things is taking over Singapore

There are more than ten billion units connected to the web today, and this number will have increased five times over by 2020. This is a well accepted prediction by large industry players, including CISCO, and data houses such as Frost & Sullivan.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment.

IoT, which excludes PCs, tablets and smart-phones, will grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020 representing an almost 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion in 2009, according to Gartner. IoT product and service suppliers are predicting to generate an incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion, mostly in services, in the year 2020.

It will result in $1.9 trillion in global economic value-add through sales into diverse end markets (as predicted by Gartner in its recent Forecast Report on the Internet of Things).

These predictions are made possible due to the following few reasons.

Firstly, the cost of sensor technology has fallen due to recent breakthrough innovations. This reduced significantly the barriers to entry for technology firms to develop and commercialise sensor technology.

This has led to the widespread diffusion and integration of sensor technology into a wide-range of industries.

Secondly, the cost of implementing communication technology to talk to other electronic devices has fallen. Accordingly to PA consulting, a consulting and technology firm, the cost of communication technology has fallen to a “single-digit cost”.

As a matter of fact, a uniformed standard of communication policy has emerged as a result of this trend.

Thirdly, the move towards the standardization of communication protocols has gained much traction. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) recently announced a partnership with several other standards agencies to create a global machine-to-machine communications standard.

In addition, the spread of smart-phones, tablet devices and mobile applications has led to billions of user-related data being generated. Together with the rise of low cost cloud computing and big data analytics, data generated from user behaviour can be stored and analysed.

This allows firms to better understand the customer needs, and make adjustment to IoT technology to serve them better.

Furthermore, dramatic decline in storage costs has inversely increase storage capacity, some available via cloud computing. Such steep decline in cost per unit storage has made possible number crunching at very large scale with greater affordability.

Lastly, when all the connected devices become identifiable and smart devices become more prevalent, new IP addresses are required for albeit products. The Giant New Internet inadvertently came to the rescue.

With IPv6, “trillions and trillions of times larger”, there will be sufficient room to meet the new requirements of IoT. Hence, any object can be tagged with a unique IP address.

A series of changes is expected for the IT industry for the years to come. IoT will bring about a convergence of technologies never seen before ... an IoT revolution is in the making...

Oliver is among the speakers who will be sharing their expertise at the IoT Asia 2014 conference.

IoT Asia 2014
Singapore Expo Convention & Exhibition Centre
21-22 April 2014

Click here to register.