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1. MWC 2014: Internet of Things (IoT) Finally Becomes Internet of
Everything (IoE)
Posted by Neil Shah
The Big (ger) Opportunity
Mobile World Congress, over the years has been very focused on mobile devices with
glittery flagship launches right from big to small device manufacturers dominating the
headlines and the showshare. However, the focus and the discussion at MWC 2014 has
clearly shifted beyond mobile devices and into actual services and infrastructure which
is going to power the next billion things which connecting to the internet. Service
providers, infrastructure vendors, software and cloud platform companies all took center
stage at this year's MWC.
In one of the keynotes at MWC 2014, John Chambers, Cisco's CEO highlighted: “When
I came to Cisco there were about a thousand things connected to the Internet, now
there are 10 billion … by the end of the decade there will be 50 billion.”
(Image Source)
The quote from Mr. Chambers speaks volumes on how big this opportunity is and how
bigger it’s going to be over the next few years when we will have more connected
devices than humans. Almost every booth other than the mobile phone, tablets and
accessories manufacturers had a common goal -- How to deploy, connect, enable and
manage this disruptive wave of billions of "things", calling them as Internet of Things
(IoT). The entire economics are different for IoT when compared to the mobile phones
on a cellular network. The IoT requires entirely scalable, low-cost, intelligent and reliable
networks.

2. The ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE)
In just span of a year, many service providers, infrastructure, cloud and platform
vendors are almost planning to take a radical approach on how they can build networks,
infrastructure, platforms, and applications to connect these billion of devices to the
internet.
One of the key reason being, the industry has realized the huge potential of "Internet of
Things" beyond targeted verticals and M2M applications such as smart meters,
telematics and others. Industry players are now pretty ambitious to connect almost
anything and everything, and collect every possible datapoint from every sensor on
those devices moving beyond the traditional M2M data exchange into complex things
such as connected cars, cities, wearables & others. We are essentially moving from a
network of less smarter things to a network of much smarter things which have sensing
capabilities and provide context (location, etc.) similar to evolution from feature phones
to smartphones but this time it’s quicker than expected.
This opens up infinite opportunities to make everything around us connected, intelligent,
autonomous (in some cases) and manageable. Thus "Internet of Things" (IoT) has
swiftly expanded to what can be now called "Internet of Everything" (IoE).
The Better Approach
As a result, service providers will have to give up their earlier 'siloed' approach to
deploying M2M infrastructure and thus will have to start from a cleaner slate to make
the infrastructure broader, scalable, reliable and independent of the device categories or
verticals. The goal would be to allow service providers to take their current M2M
business beyond “wholesale” and into consumer space powered by a common and
elastic, scalable platform and infrastructure underneath.
NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) will play an important role to virtualize number
of functions from infrastructure perspective to achieve the above and power the IoE.
There were number of companies showcasing their cutting-edge solutions at MWC
2014. Some of the NFV vendors have even leapfrogged ahead researching and
commercializing NFV 2.0 solutions taking different approach on how they can virtualize
the infrastructure and help service providers potentially reduce theirs CAPEX &
OPEX costs to almost 15-20% of the current structure, improve service delivery and
monetize in a better way.
LTE-Advanced (3GPP Rel. 11/12/13) and ongoing changes in infrastructure will
another key driver towards reducing latency, enhancing the signaling and energy
efficiency, improving throughput and thus leading to better QoS,, key to a sustainable
IoT network.

3. ‘Big Data to Big Information”
Big Data, as everyone often have talked about over the last year was also one of the
underlying theme at the show with many vendors unveiling solutions to help service
providers track, decipher, analyze and convert zillions of data points coming from
billions of devices connected to their network in real-time into actionable insights. Big
Data will need to translate into Big Information to transform the data pipe an intelligent
pipe.
Real-Time intelligence gathering will be thus important to optimize their networks,
services and infrastructure by harnessing the power of cloud and data analytics. This
will allow service providers to offer the best and consistent quality of service (QoS)
when managing such as big network from connected device and traffic perspective.
Additionally, insights gained from the network will also help service providers
understand the network, devices, users and newer use-cases. This will in-turn help
service providers to build new monetization services, effective pricing models, clever
policies and much more to enable “data-as-a-service” (DaaS) type adjacent business
models leveraging IoE data.
In summary, at MWC 2014 we finally witnessed the glimpse of M2M 2.0 revolution or
one can say IoE evolution demanding newer approaches from service providers to
make their network much more intelligent, scalable, and reliable and in addition also
seed newer monetization opportunities. IoE also offers a broader, deeper contextually
connected intelligent network providing opportunities for service providers to make
meaningful differences by empowering people and devices, thus, increasing the value
of the network*.
*Metcalfe’s law
About the Author
Learn more about Neil and access all his blog posts here
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For more discussions and topics around SP Mobility, please visit our Mobility Community:
http://cisco.com/go/mobilitycommunity