Former FCC Chief Technologist Questions Importance of the IoT

The IoT isn’t new, “it’s actually older than the internet,” and in many cases it’s overrated, said former FCC Chief Technologist Henning Schulzrinne at an IEEE 5G conference. The IoT dates to the advent 40 years ago of X10, a protocol for communication among electronic devices used for home automation, he said. “You would modulate the power line to create many of the smart home devices that we now have,” he said: “The idea and concept” of the IoT “certainly are not new.” Schulzrinne, a computer science professor at Columbia University, warned against taking at face value estimates of tens of billions of IoT devices in a few years. “Your incentive as an estimator is to pick the highest possible number, because nobody is going to ask for justification, because that’s the most likely to be cited” in industry discussions, he said. “Why would you cite a 20 billion number if a 50 billion number is available?” Schulzrinne questioned whether all IoT devices are better than what they replace. “A classical light switch is actually brilliant,” he said. “It has no power consumption. It doesn’t need to be configured. It has really good security properties, as in you have to be in the building to actually activate it, and it can be operated by a 2-year-old. The IoT, not so much.”