Machine to machine: the submerged part of the IoT iceberg

What do a billboard, water meter, box compactor and a recharging station for electrical vehicles have in common? The OVH Blog.

Friday, 29th July 2016 Posted 8 years ago in by Phil Alsop

At first, it seems nothing, but these items are becoming more and more connected. Through sensors, they are able to transmit information regarding their state. This facilitates the collection of important data and the ability to maintain operational conditions remotely. Deployed en mass around the world, these devices make up a farm of connected objects. More than the Internet of Things (IoT), this is machine communicating with machine.

Most uses remain to be invented

A smart electric vehicle charging station can transmit information regarding its status, signaling if it is out of order. A water meter can send readings remotely or aggregate all the readings from the same zone, making it also possible to detect leaks in the water distribution network. The box compacter can transmit data regarding its level and request a truck be dispatched when full.

The examples are numerous, but many more are still left to be imagined. And these are just simple examples. They don’t take into account any new services made possible through statistical analysis once data is collected. From data to algorithms, algorithms to big data, from big data to machine learning, we are well on our way towards a new revolution.

Many companies took advantage of the numerous business opportunities, like the start-up Connit, which specialises in Industrial IoT and machine to machine (M2M), that is to say, the monitoring and control of equipment remotely via intelligent applications. Historically focused on smart metering, today Connit manages a wide variety of projects for the industrial accounts. In total, Connit has more than 50,000 connected devices deployed around the world, which collect, stores and process their data amounting to around 25 million logs each month.

In IoT, you have to be good everywhere: business, electronics, design, development, infrastructure, organisation of systems

M2M projects require specific skills from the hardware at the start of the chain – the sensors and on-board electronics – to the platform that receives the data (software) and the associated services, using the low bandwidth communications network dedicated to IoT (such as Sigfox and LoRa) or mobile network (GPRS). This is a challenge, because we can’t have a weak link anywhere.

The challenge for new IoT businesses is on multiple fronts: get the funds to build and backup your start-up and have the tools so that you can process all the collected data.

Funds: You can get help from many incubators, like the Digital Launch Pad programme. Start ups are able to get support for prototyping and infrastructure capacity for several months, and also to get support in logistics and Marketing.

Technology: many tools to process the data are available, like the DBaaS Time Series. The goal is to delegate the maximum level of management of your platform to a communication service provider (CSP), so that you can concentrate on matters where yours expertise adds the most value.

Network: with an estimated 403 zettabytes of data travelling on the network, providers should be ready to put their infrastructure on steroids.