Disclaimer: I work for an IoT company and our big solution to this and many others is LoRaWAN. Essentially super cheap low power data transmission network that is in the process of being rolled out as an infrastructure component. Companies like Comcast have made large pledges to provide huge, cheap nationwide coverage in the coming years. The cost of doing that is the LoRaWAN protocol is very low bandwidth but thats pretty good for IoT when most of the time you just need to transfer state.
Also I think LoRaWan networks wouldn't have to necessarily rely on the internet which is the original intent of the article. I think it could be possible to be much more localized like in your house, but right now its early stages and all of the tech i've seen is meant to provide much larger networks.