Connected future is bringing real productivity gains

The internet of things (IoT) is making its way into our homes, cars and offices, and is bringing real productivity gains and other improvements with it. And we are just at the beginning of this revolution, according to Three Ireland head of connected solutions Karl McDermott.

"The latest Gartner research puts the number of connected things in the world at 8.4 billion at the moment, 31 per cent up on 2016," he says. "The number is expected to grow to 20 billion by 2020, and total spending on end points and services is expected to reach $2 trillion by the end of this year."

While IoT has only come into the mainstream business vocabulary fairly recently, he points out that some companies have been using the technology or variants of it for many years.

“They’ve been using it with barcode scanners, and logistics companies have been using it to track lorries and so on. They are now putting it to more active uses. It is being used to predict the arrival time of loads in logistics, to ensure that the right items are delivered to the right customers, and to locate lost items. We are now seeing more and more smaller companies using it as well.”

One of the areas where Three has been active is the waste-management sector.

"You can use the technology to tell if a bin is full or not, and to only schedule a pick-up when it is. Our global parent Hutchinson has developed solutions in this area, and we are talking to Irish waste-management companies about them at the moment. The technology can help cut costs dramatically by reducing the number of trucks on the road."

It will also improve lives for householders who complain about traffic congestion in housing estates caused by the bin lorries of rival waste companies.

Car rentals

The fleet management sector is also making extensive use of the technology in some very clever ways.

“Car rental companies are using it to track where cars have gone while they’ve been out with customers,” says McDermott. “One of our customers in the sector is also using it to reduce levels of fraud quite considerably. The can tell where a vehicle has been and when it was there, and can tell if it was at the claimed location of an accident or not. The technology can also tell if a car was accelerating at the time of a crash and so on. Insurance companies are using the same technology to monitor driver behaviour.”

It is also useful to motorists. “Taking it to the next level, you will be able to link the car to the AA or another breakdown service so that they can locate your car to its exact position on a call-out.”

They will also be able to carry out diagnostics over the internet before they arrive to help them solve the car problem quicker. “Since 2003 every car has an OBD-2 socket, which is a bit like the scart connection on your TV set. You can plug a device into it that will collect all sorts of data from the car and use it for a variety of purposes.

Check-up

“A company could use these devices to connect their fleet to a maintenance company, which would keep an eye on the performance of the cars, tyre pressures and so on, and alert the driver when it needs to be taken in for attention. It’ll be a bit like getting a text message from your dentist to remind you about your next check-up.”

The retail sector is also making more extensive use of the technology.

“Digital signage in shops will change according to known customer preferences,” says McDermott. “If I log into the wifi service the shop’s network will know that Karl McDermott is there, and can display ads personalised to what it knows about my preferences.”

There are also interesting developments with the technology itself.

"With the amount of connected devices growing almost exponentially there are bound to be difficulties in processing it, particularly if you are sending it all up to the cloud. That's brought about what Cisco has called fog computing where there is more computing power at the edge of the systems."

This sees devices themselves having the computing power to make their own decisions without data having to be uploaded to the cloud and going through several other processes first. This will be particularly useful in manufacturing production lines where quality assurance systems will be able to remove defective products immediately on detection.

Artificial intelligence

Another development is the increased application of artificial intelligence (AI) to IoT. Again this is partly being driven by the huge growth in data being collected. "AI will enable IoT systems to use predictive analytics to anticipate customer preferences and demand. This will be very useful to companies like Amazon. "

The other significant development is in security.

“Security is a concern where IoT is involved,” says McDermott. “You don’t want an autonomous car being hacked when it’s travelling at 110km/h on the M50. There will be lots of devices in the car all connected to the internet via a gateway, and securing them will be a challenge. But there is a technology out there that’s very suited to securing multi-transactional processes. A lot of work is being done at present on combining blockchain technology with IoT devices.”

You might not buy a car with bitcoin any time soon, but you may well find that your next car is secured using the underlying blockchain technology.