Conversation

The "internet of things" space seems to be doing very poorly, relative to its glory days? IIRC there was a time everyone thought it was the future of the internet. Now every big tech company has smart home stuff and nobody seems to care
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I did a bit of work on radio spectrum allocation in grad school, and there was some hope from regulators that 5G spectrum availability would unlock some disruptive innovation in IoT space. Something about 5G being like "beams" of connectivity between beacons and devices
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The number of embedded devices is already like an order of magnitude higher than human use clients and growing much faster. IoT is a memetically weak frame but what it points to is doing fine. Growing too fast even, security-wise.
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I don’t think spectrum is the bottleneck. NFC and WiFi tethering is good enough for most applications, don’t need independent comms. And most routers/endpoints in home/office aren’t maxed out. The bottleneck is probably design and programming.
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The problem with IoT is that code changes slowly and devices can stay in the field a long time in critical apps. Like a security camera. That combo makes them both more vulnerable security-wise and more expensive to maintain. So you get scenarios like IoT botnets.
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It’s slow to evolve for a weaker version of the reason space qualified radhard electronics evolves more slowly. More demanding constraints and more hostile threat environment. That’s why Perseverance is running a 1998 vintage PowerPC chip. But I wouldn’t call it “doing poorly”
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