Estimated reading time - 3 min
“The keys to success revolve around developing an end-to-end perspective on IoT network layers so that an effective comparison of different IoT technologies in each layer can take place. In this context, it is important to maintain a strong focus on use case alignment.” said Gary Gutknecht, Technicolor
Network Service Providers (NSPs) have a major opportunity to generate new categories of revenue from current and future subscribers by harvesting demand for Managed IoT Services. Moreover, NSPs are positioned better than many other industries. This is the central observation of Gary Gutknecht — Chief Technology Officer for Technicolor’s Connected Home Division, known as Vantiva — in a white paper entitled: “Navigating IoT Technologies, Standards and Frameworks for Managed IoT Service.” He is presenting the paper at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2018, in Atlanta, Ga., October 22-25.
NSPs have the organizational and business structure to successfully build all the necessary IoT layers of: connectivity and networking; core IoT platforms and services.
Overcoming Challenges Key to Harvesting IoT Opportunity
Gutknecht points out that IoT technologies and ecosystems today are complex and fragmented, making it challenging for NSPs to formulate a winning strategy. Specifically:
- A significant number of complex heterogeneous IoT options for sensor connectivity and networking and application layers make it challenging to understand the best solution for targeted use cases.
- Functional overlap is pervasive when considering networking and IoT sensor application layer options.
- IoT connectivity protocols and standards such as Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-wave, BLE, NB-IoT, LoRa and SigFox can be confusing without a thorough understanding of their technical features, optimizations and use cases.
In addition to these challenges, IoT solutions connect to their closed service layers using different messaging protocols (CoAP, MQTT, HTTP, AQMP), data-models and proprietary APIs, which make service integration difficult.
The keys to success revolve around developing an end-to-end perspective on IoT network layers so that an effective comparison of different IoT technologies in each layer can take place. In this context, says Gutknecht, is important to maintain a strong focus on use case alignment.
In addition, NSPs must integrate considerations about security, privacy, reliability and scale at the very beginning of the planning and design process, some of which can be partially or wholly satisfied by leveraging edge compute capabilities and trends.
In the white paper, Gary offers a review of harmonization efforts among standards initiatives that are underway at each layer of the IoT environment and he offers a brief introduction to IoT data-model normalization efforts in the industry.
To gain a clear understanding of the current e2e IoT technology landscape in a structured taxonomy and develop a current and practical view of how to apply this understanding to NSP IoT decision-making processes.
