The Internet of Pointless Things
forbes.com
forbes.com
Just looking around me there are 45 wireless SSIDs, crazy interference and nothing but crap flying around my airspace. Half the time I can see people's bluetooth devices wide open in nearby houses as well.
Add to that the impending 9000 useless little devices that will be broken and this is the RF equivalent of space debris. It's got to the point I can barely keep a WiFi connection up for more than a few minutes already. Even on my 4G connection I'm lucky to get 4mbits due to the contention locally. I can upload at 40mbits though which is crazy
So literally last weekend I cabled my house with 5 runs of 100 meg ethernet and a couple of long patch leads in the living room and stuffed in a cheap 8 port netgear switch from ebay. Plugged the whole thing into my router and turned off the WiFi entirely just using it as a switch + NAT combo.
I can now transfer files between my desktop and laptop at 10Mbytes/second rather than 500k/second with dropouts. It is simply bliss. Even my wife is no longer annoyed about the prospect of dangling wires because stuff is working again.
It has got to the point that I'd rather have a broken CAT5 plug that falls out every 5 minutes than WiFi. I really don't know how all this tech is going to work when there is so much contention and noise already. I think it will just contribute to the pain.
Exactly. I don't give out a lot of tech-guy advice to folks these days, and most people don't even think of me as "the computer guy" in their social circle ... but any chance I have I implore people to hardwire their networking connections.
No matter how good your AP is or how nice your Sonos mesh algorithm is or how clear your airspace is ... you will deal with random, annoying, difficult to diagnose wireless comms issues. It's very easy to make that entire class of problem disappear from your life. It's also a lot faster.
EDIT: actually, this post will seem a bit disingenuous when we (rsync.net) officially announce the drive-up feature at our datacenter locations. We're stacking the deck in our favor by using Ubiquiti long-range APs ...
The cables are not brought out to connectors at all. When a need for connectivity appears it is easy to tone a cable through the wall, find the wires, cut through and install a box with connectors.
Thanks to this setup wifi use is kept to a minimum and security is enhanced greatly. It's always fun to watch the reaction of phone company technicians the few times we've changed internet connectivity when they walk into a garage full of computers, lab and cnc equipment and an EIA rack with servers, a large switch, hardware firewall and patch panels. They usually say something like "OK, here's the cable, it might be better if you wire it."
The first place was a small business and their network guys were nails. They had the whole system set up in three days, and we were screaming (close to a 100MB both ways) and since we didn't have a ton of users, it was rock solid and really dependable.
Just landed a few months ago at a huge corporation who did the same thing and it's horrible. The connection drops in and out, the speeds are anemic (around 2-5MB during the day, both ways) and in out project room, we've had so many problems, they're going to turn the LAN outlets back on so the service will be at least reliable.
The crazy thing is I've spoken to other people on my floor and they've told me before they went wireless, the network was far more reliable and much faster (closer to 40-50MB) both up and down.
Mind you, I assume enterprise hardware prioritizes security over performance, whereas consumer devices prioritize performance over security.
I mostly use a desktop so this is primarily for the wife and kids.
What about tablets/iPads for wife and kids?
I don't know why you were getting so many dropouts but it's not because "wifi is bad". I live in a house with lots of noise from neighbours wifi, but no problems here. Wifi will be solid for months at a time.
I must have a good wifi router (Billion 7800NL). Not all routers are created equal, I've gone through a couple of duds before the Billion. Some deal with interference better than others. Let the router choose the channel automatically too, very important.
My house is old, quite large, thick walls and so on. But everyone uses wi-fi here from different rooms without any issues. A lot of simultaneous connections going on too.
I took this angle early on and have never had second thoughts. As they say, "It just works."
Glad you are seeing the benefits.
However, I think "WiFi" is a strong marketing signal. Even if it does not work as well as Ethernet at transferring data, it appears to work well to sell products and services.
"I really don't know how this tech is going to work..."
It may not have to work. Consumers of computing devices have developed a high tolerance for stuff that is either ridiculously slow or does not work. Many do not know any different: when none of the devices people use have an Ethernet port, they will never know the speeds they are missing. The choice of using Ethernet has been removed.
The dominant discourse when you talk to many OEMs is that this is a defensive play to be prepared for all those secretive inventions that Google and Apple are making in their X-Labs. They don't know what's coming so they are throwing everything at it to "cloud-wash" and "IoT-wash" their offerings even when their customers are justifiably scared about the risks of cyber-attacks that connected machines bring into their factories and plants.
In short, not enough RoI evident for the investments and changes in processes IoT mandates in the enterprise - especially in the production plants. However, based on my discussion with all the different actors, its likely that we'll find use cases in either Operations Optimization or Asset Optimization.
http://www.zeefaxcms.com/images/data_sheets/zeefax_data_shee...
you can reach out to me via LinkedIn/Google - rchikballapur.
Cheers!
If there's no end user benefit unless they can get the government to force the population to use them, most "smart" devices will end up doing the equivalent of the 80s/90s VCR clock flashing 12:00. Maybe the strategy to work around that is light bulbs of the future will refuse to turn on unless you give the home factory in China full access to your complete facebook, twitter, and linkedin profiles and perhaps your credit card number so you can purchase "upgrades" to run beyond 100 hours or beyond 50% brightness levels.
I'll be using dumb bulbs and laughing at people stuck with inferior smart bulbs.
I've also got concerns about the material used to make the candles themselves. I started burning beeswax candles, and now when I'm around the more common sort it smells like factory waste, or like someone took all the chemicals under a sink and mixed them together. Unpleasant and disquieting.
Create a closed/proprietary platform, lock people in, cash out.
Create sloppy "security", sell the solution for it, cash out.
We really don't need this stuff. It exists because money is being spent on talking us into spending money on it.
I'd love a "smart house" - the fewer things I have to do when I get home, the more time I have to relax or do my own thing! I know the promise of the smart house and the execution of the smart house are years apart, but I feel we are just now getting to the "promise" part.
The "internet of things" is the same shit. Something people like to mention at TED conferences. But do we want it? Is the market ready for it? No one's asking that. If you ask me, we're not ready. At the moment, the tech is too expensive and too useless. A few things will win out with affluent customers (thermostats, audio systems). But putting chips in everything we own is a far off dream.
We've gone from talking about how devices will change how we live and work to having devices that are changing how we live and work. Ok they weren't VR or TVs, they were sensor heavy mobile devices. But still.
And they're not completely pointless. They may not have solved world peace but they've changed comms in quite positive ways; I have to travel for work and video chat to my family is a wonderful thing.
Also, over the last year or so, I've seen a noticeable increase in people taking an interest with their health due to Fitbits and the like. Having that feedback loop, although a small thing, can make quite a difference.
I can see this sort of thing having logical extensions into the home because we now carry sophisticated control systems with us. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if we don't start getting QR codes on menus/food packs with nutrient content, for example.
Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate that what I'm talking about here are all first world solutions to first world problems. But the idea of connected stuff affecting ones life isn't in the future.
But what solves the issue of being useless? And what is that price-lowering killer app gonna be if IOT means shoving a wifi adapter in your blender?
An internet-connected coffee pot or dishwasher is hard to appreciate now. But what if they alerted and called a service guy if they failed? That would be handy. We'd come to hate the non-connected device that didn't appear on our 'household service dashboard' app. It'd be like having a Victrola in the house.
Then inexplicably, halfway through the video this crap about measuring the child's weight every time they use the chair. Nothing in the original problem says anything about tracking weight? Ridiculous leap from "can't find a good high chair" to "high chair with built in wireless scales".
Is there something in the kickstarter ts&cs that says "projects must have wireless connectivity and an app" that I'm missing?
If it's not secure, I could imagine people fiddling with the weights just to scare the crap out of parents. It's something my younger self would do.
It demonstrates to me how fundamentally unserious the IoT is that people keep coming back to trying to replace a light switch. Light switches are really good, guys. They're fast, everyone understands them, and they're reliable. Don't get me wrong, anything can be improved, but:
1. Every IoT lightbulb thing I've ever seen has been strictly inferior to the light switch.
2. Even if you did manage to actually improve it, how much are you improving it, at what cost? I'm not going to pay $100 to make it very very slightly more convenient to turn on my lights.
Then again, most of this 'connected' crap is good as a hobby only. I like playing with it, but the actual added value is very low.
After two years either you'll realize that you didn't need that sort of thing at all or you'll realize that that sort of thing is exactly what you needed and you buy a a newer and better one.
I'm a huge believer in data and its ability to make things better, whether for companies (seen for years with Business Intelligence software and whatnot) and now, with IoT, for individuals.
Problem is, now that we can gather thousands of data points about an individual (what exact time I woke up this morning, how well I slept, how long I brushed my teeth, the calories in my breakfast, what I had for breakfast, what time the sun came up, my self-reported mood, the length of my commute, how many stop lights I encountered...) we have no idea what to DO with that data. The state of IoT is ridiculous right now because every company is trying to cash in on it using the old model of marketing ("Surely if we know enough about our customers we can create ads that they will want to action on!") and this old model is 95% dead now that the majority of people get their content served up via the internet instead of newspaper/magazine and streaming instead of cable.
I believe that once the marketing field catches up with the way people are actually living and works in conjunction with the makers in technology companies coming up with products and solutions that actually make people's lives better then IoT will start to make sense. I have hope that this will happen... but am pessimistic about the timeline.
IoT means data, and to me "more data always means more better", but data is only as good as the questions you ask it and right now we're really, really bad at asking the right questions.