Mark Zuckerberg says let’s get the last few billion connected

Every year, I feel a sense of anti-climax when I depart from a week of buzzing around in the noisy halls of MWC at Barcelona, the world’s mobile capital. But this time, when I stepped out of an event that draws almost 100,000 visitors to run to a client dinner across town, any feelings of sadness were scotched by the urgency of how much I have to do when I get back to office: The conclusion from MWC16 is that the Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t hype and hockey sticks anymore, but a real work in progress.

As a relief from the incessant waves of hyperbole that accompanied the advents of WiFi, 3G, 4G and mobile internet, there was virtually no discussion this year of numbers for the Internet of Things. All that was clearly done and dusted in 2015.  This year, numbers talk was replaced almost completely by an industry of use cases, experimental demos and real, on-sale objects which put the IoT into everyday use.

At the GSMA’s Innovation City (renamed from years of rapid evolution as the Connected City), you could look at Tumi bags ready-equipped with tracking devices (yes, I bought one), a beautiful Jaguar SUV connected car, and an Audi equipped with numerous machine-to-machine connected devices to help track its performance and safety. There was an intriguing teddy bear which I never got to test out, and the gimmicky mobile-enabled toothbrush of last year was gone. There were more stands hosted by auto manufacturers and appliance makers and telco executives spent more time walking around and less time standing at booths showing people how a network works.

At the MWC’s prestigious Ministerial Programme, my panel this year focussed on the Internet of Things. I hosted the Global CEO of Orange, the head of ARCEP (France’s telecom regulator), senior government leaders from South Korea and Brazil and the director of Jaguar Land Rover’s Connected Car programme. What an enlightening panel this was, with a number of important messages coming out of it:

• The IoT is here to stay and is the biggest development the industry will see this generation
• The IoT must not be “regulated” to death, but rather must be nurtured and supported to grow and transform our society in the way that its potential promises
• Industries as we know them (including the telecom industry) will be overhauled and transformed by the IoT and we are starting with logistics, agri, cities and health
• Industries are colliding into each other, disrupting each other’s value chains with new services being created for hungry customers and enterprises who want more functionality, in real time, and synchronised across multiple formats and devices
• Vision is required from policymakers and regulators along with an openness to listen, learn and experiment
• Every industry player must be given an equal chance to play in the IoT
• Public-private partnership has to be the way forward for complex, all-encompassing projects such as smart cities
• Policymakers are working together across industry boundaries and borders, and some are even providing tax incentives for high growth sectors to scale quicker
• Industries (such as the auto industry) are getting on with it: Already deep in implementing new technology that connects the car and overcoming, one by one, the cross industry obstacles that have to be overcome to do so

Further afield in the MWC, there was ample more evidence of how things in general are moving on. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, spoke passionately about how he wants to see the last few billion people on earth get connected to the internet and how Facebook is investing in drones, fibre and satellites to enable this. He hosted a private dinner with top telecom CEOs to discuss how they can work together to do this.

PwC hosted its first Digital Revolution Summit (DRS), with speakers from various industries grappling with the specific problems they see and possible solutions, to implementing the IoT. DRS took place in the once distant Hall 8, now emerging as a magnetic zone at the Fira where upstart innovators and kick-ass new developers have stands popping up showing off the latest innovations. In an era where the playing field is levelled between the behemoth MNC and the unknown SME, watch out as some of the Hall 8 vanguards become global businesses which take on the internet giants in the next decade.

IoT wasn’t the only acronym on show. How could it be? No matter how much the industry transforms, it doesn’t seem to be losing its letters and numbers yet. 5G was talked of a lot, as was LPWAN, Low Powered Wide Area Networks. Both are highly relevant to the next steps in the journey. 5G will put in place network architecture that enables more harmonisation across transmission technologies which today are still distinct (such as CDMA and GSM). LPWAN will enable network operators to repurpose some of the network to run on low power, carrying bits and bytes of data only, perfect for IoT uses over huge areas. Doing so will allow networks to reach up to 7x as far as they do today, meaning that agriculture, another big candidate for IoT-enabled value, will benefit through solutions which enable farmers to track how effectively animals are grazing, control irrigation levels and monitor crop sunshine exposure. (Connected cows, on show in Hall 3 this year, may actually become a reality soon.)

All in all, a workmanlike MWC this year with less of the shiny suit stats and more of the sleeves-rolled up conversations that will no doubt continue beyond the event.  These are the conversations that will transform our business models, digitise our user experience and revolutionise how we manage our enterprises. Until one day we wake up and realise we’ve changed our world so completely that it is unrecognisable from what we had before.

@mtchowdhury

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.