
The Backbone of the Internet of Things - mirandaBC
https://backchannel.com/the-surprising-backbone-of-the-internet-of-things-4330301084b0#.e6hixwq0b
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huslage
This is something that comes up once in a while as a technoutopian future
where our spectrum is free and there is fiber to every blade of grass on the
planet. There are way bigger problems than the access and ownership things
mentioned here. The frequencies used by 4G and 5G will not benefit from the
low heights of telephone poles...radios don't work the way this person think
they work. We need spectrum reform and wideband radios before we even think
about something like lightpole-based Internets.

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x2398dh1
Actually, the problem is not the height of the poles, because those cellular
base stations will become progressively cheaper over time, so you can simply
do more deployments. I may be missing something...what kind of spectrum reform
are you referring to specifically?

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Animats
It's been done. Ricochet had street-light based nodes in the mid-1990s.[1] I
used to have a transceiver for that service. Speed was about 30Kb/s, which is
why the service went out of business by 2001. One of the neat, but not too
useful, features was that you could make connections to peers on the same set
of street light nodes without going through the headend.

Street light WiFi nodes are deployed in some areas.

Most useful IoT things need very minimal bandwidth, which they can get over
2-way pager networks or cellular modems. Thousands of commercial
refrigerators, HVAC systems, sewerage lift pumps, and other boring but
important items of infrastructure phone home that way right now. But there's
not enough bandwidth for the "always listening and watching" boxes that have
become popular.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_\(Internet_service\))

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newman314
Wow, blast from the past.

I had one of those too. It was useful for its time.

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x2398dh1
So what she's saying in this article is that the physical poles on which
street lights reside represent what will soon become valuable real estate.

She's probably right. But what I worry about regarding street lighting and
anything municipal-IoT related, at least in America, is that a lot of IoT
business models seem to be along the lines of, "we're not selling you an LED
light, we're selling you a monthly lighting plan! It's a whole new paradigm!"

That may work for the corporate world, where timeframes tend to go in
quarterly, yearly or three-year cycles, but in the municipal world, timeframes
for equipment could be up to, perhaps 50 years or more. The sentiment in this
scenario would be, "we need that manhole cover to continue to work."

If you have smart LED lighting (which was not discussed in this article), in a
municipality, being sold on a monthly plan, and then the city has a down year,
or a Detroit-style downturn or whatever, and the city tries to negotiate with
the LED lighting company providing that service, that LED lighting service
company can threaten to, "turn off the lights," which would lead to all sorts
of bad press for the city workers, who ultimately are just trying to live
safe, protected lives working in guaranteed government jobs.

So I guess my contribution to this discussion is - I speculate or worry that
companies may try to barter for that real estate by offering highly discounted
smart lighting systems, because, "hey, we're already there...we might as well
help you control the light, and provide you a huge discount!" For cities who
don't have smart CIOs and CFOs who understand this stuff, they are going to
end up getting screwed.

Mind you, my perspective is totally American...could be different in other
countries depending upon how these government functions are organized.

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nbadg
This is definitely off-topic to the linked article, but to your point re:
selling an LED vs a lighting plan: I think this is largely a failure on the
part of companies to transition to a service-based model in light of
decreasing emphasis on consumerism and the greater importance of
sustainability.

More explicitly (and with fewer buzzwords), since WWII the USA has been
pushing consumption as a cultural value to fuel the economy. Everything has
been treated as "this equipment is disposable, with a service life of X".
Arguably, goods producers still use the same process during design (since it
provides a good optimization constraint), but the service life of consumables
has been increasing. The LED vs incandescent transition is a perfect example,
because you've gone from a consumable with a service life that is dependably
short enough for the bulb producer to rely upon repeat sales, to an equivalent
consumable with a service life that is so long that the bulb producer can't
keep its own business running sustainably. As far as I can tell, consumer-side
economic pressures have encouraged this trend for pretty much every market in
existence, though each individual market may have a starkly different rate of
change (the medical consumables market being perhaps the slowest, at least
that comes to my mind).

When you're faced with that transition, as a company your best hope for
survival is to transition to a service-based economy. In the mobile phone
market (and to a degree, in the computer market), the service being sold has,
essentially, been innovation itself: "we'll release a new phone every so
often, and in exchange for your yearly contribution to our coffers, we'll make
sure it's an improvement over your last model". But I think the phone market
also offers cautionary advice: this strategy saturates once consumers realize
they've hit the point of diminishing returns. Furthermore, efforts to do
something equivalent with LED bulbs are rightly met with skepticism, because
those diminishing returns are immediately and clearly evident. So even that is
clearly not a sustainable solution in the long term.

So where do you go from there? Market contraction? As a company, that means
you're playing roulette. You're going to try and find some other offerable
service to maximize your odds of survival. But at the end of the day, I think
it's that discord between consumer interests and supply-side economics that
have created this brave new world of LED lighting plans and iPhones on demand.
Call it what you will -- perhaps another indication of the upcoming
technological unemployment crisis -- but given the degree to which we're
developing these kinds of long-service-life consumables, I think the trend is
only going to get stronger.

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x2398dh1
I agree with you that there is a trend of, "the service being sold has,
essentially, been innovation itself," but respectfully, I don't agree with
your characterization of the driver behind that trend. Widely held, "common
sense," a term which I loathe to use, is that the service life of consumables
has been decreasing, not increasing. There's the whole anecdote of how things
like vacuum cleaners in the 50's would, "last forever," because the belt they
used was thick, whereas as manufacturing techniques became more sophisticated,
they figured out how to optimize the thickness of that belt so that it would
break exactly after the warranty wore out.

Not to disagree with you for the sake of online argument, but I believe the
driving forces behind, "innovation is the product," include, 1) Greater
ubiquity of manufacturing knowledge, which is arguably a function of time vs.
improved information transfer technologies, and 2) Increased ubiquity of
digital services, which is also a function of time vs. improved information
transfer technologies.

So basically, throughout the 20th Century, Bille Bob gets a hold of some files
which show him how to manufacture vacuum belts, and so he opens up a vacuum
belt plant down in Alabama. Then Jackie Wu over in Hong Kong gets a hold of a
similar plan about 10 years later, and opens up a factory in Shenzhen, and
then the same happens in Vietnam, and so on. So now what you have is basically
a global economy of vacuum belts, which are basically a complete commodity -
all because successive information-lacking regions gained more access to more
information over time. So now we're at that, "paradigm shift," where Billie
Bob is realizing that he's competing against the entire world, so he either
needs to leverage nepotism (a short term strategy), protectionism (e.g. vote
for Trump) or a third, innovative strategy, which may include the best value
vacuum belts...kind of hard to build value...or turn those vacuum belts into a
service, because building a service brand is not a function of intellectual
property protection, and he can continue to hold a competitive advantage with
a service business, indefinitely, as long as he can maintain that level of
service. That's why we're going to see vacuums coming out with sensors that
tell you when the belt goes out and automatically sends you a new one via
Amazon or whatever - it's a huge competitive advantage over Jackie Wu back in
Hong Kong.

Where do you go from there? Well, using a 1980s mentality, you start going
into other markets, you use your vacuum belt platform software that you built
and you gobble up other, weaker companies in Alabama who can't figure it out.
Or, using a late 1990s mentality, you create vacuum belt derivatives of some
sort, and sell that data to rubber hedge fund managers to show how often
vacuum belts are going out of service, so they can forecast and create short /
long positions on commodity markets. Or you create a community forum on
vacuums and talk directly to the consumer, reaching around the vacuum
manufacturer, etc. There are tons of different ideas and it is only limited to
your imagination. We are not necessarily living in a world of inevitable,
"technological unemployment crisis."

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M_Grey
If I've sifted through the hyperbolic language correctly... I still don't see
how this relates to IoT products at all. Can anyone explain the connection to
me?

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gk1
Key paragraphs:

> Here’s why poles are generally important: for the advanced wireless
> transmissions (whatever 5G turns out to be) that will be central to our
> shared digital future, you need access to fiber optic cables at frequent
> geographic intervals. That fiber, in turn, needs to be “dark” — meaning that
> it’s unlit by lasers and is just a passive transmission medium that can be
> traversed by a tsunami of 5G data. And access to that dark fiber needs to be
> available at a reasonable price.

> [...] With streetlights and signal poles, a city stands a chance of pushing
> along a competitive and innovative world of Internet of Things and sensors
> and data transmission, as long as it acts decisively to open those street
> lights and signal poles on a standard technical basis — again, like an
> electrical outlet.

The street lights will transmit 5G data so that IoT devices that rely on
cellular networks (vs WiFi) can remain connected anywhere and for free or for
cheap.

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rthille
She's confused about what 'dark fiber' is. Dark fiber is fiber that's be
laid/strung, but currently doesn't have lasers connected at the ends. That is,
someone speculatively ran the fiber but currently isn't using it. Dark fiber
is useless until it's lit with (somewhat) expensive transceivers.

