Internet of Things - Questions & Answers

A number of companies and research organizations have offered a wide range of projections about the potential impact of IoT on the Internet and the economy during the next five to ten years. Cisco, for example, projects more than 24 billion Internet–connected objects by 2019. Morgan Stanley, however, projects 75 billion networked devices by 2020. Looking out further and raising the stakes higher, Huawei forecasts 100 billion IoT connections by 2025. McKinsey Global Institute suggests that the financial impact of IoT on the global economy may be as much as $3.9 to $11.1 trillion by 2025. While the variability in predictions makes any specific number questionable, collectively they paint a picture of significant growth and influence. 

While the term “Internet of Things” is relatively new, the concept of combining computers and networks to monitor and control devices has been around for decades.  By the late 1970s, for example, systems for remotely monitoring meters on the electrical grid via telephone lines were already in commercial use. In the 1990s, advances in wireless technology allowed “machine to machine” (M2M) enterprise and industrial solutions for equipment monitoring and operation to become widespread.  Many of these early M2M solutions, however, were based on closed purpose–built networks and proprietary or industry–specific standards, rather than on Internet Protocol (IP) based networks and Internet standards.

The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) was first used in 1999 by British technology pioneer Kevin Ashton to describe a system in which objects in the physical world could be connected to the Internet by sensors. Ashton coined the term to illustrate the power of connecting Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags used in corporate supply chains to the Internet in order to count and track goods without the need for human intervention. Today, the Internet of Things has become a popular term for describing scenarios in which Internet connectivity and computing capability extend to a variety of objects, devices, sensors, and everyday items. The Internet of Things engages a broad set of ideas that are complex and intertwined from different perspectives. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an important topic in technology industry, policy, and engineering circles and has become headline news in both the specialty press and the popular media. This technology is embodied in a wide spectrum