National strategy on IoT needed: analyst

TORONTO — A national strategy on Internet of Things (IoT) technology, involving businesses, academia and the government, should be developed in Canada to help the country compete, a conference heard Wednesday. Currently, Canada does not have a true national strategy for IoT, whereas the United States and the United Kingdom have invested in such initiatives, Isabel Chapman, principal analyst at the U.K.-based Machina Research, said on a panel discussing the competitive landscape in Canada at the annual Connected Plus conference in Toronto. “We have so many companies here and it sort of seems like there’s pockets of … but it just seems to be very much decentralized, and I really think if we’re going to compete as a country, you have to have a more centralized approach,” Chapman said in an interview following the panel. Chapman added that Montreal has invested in a “smart city” project, but those sorts of initiatives should be brought out on a larger scale. In 2014, then-prime minister of the U.K. David Cameron announced a doubling of funding to develop IoT in the U.K. In 2016, the U.S. government spent $8.8 billion US on IoT, up $1 billion from a year prior, according to a report by U.S.-based Govini, which provides analytics to companies that sell to the public sector. Chapman said she would like to see some funding for it in Canada. She told the audience during the panel that “we really have to push that sort of thinking out nationally. Academia has to do its part with businesses to get out there and do partnerships with really interesting IoT companies.” The Canadian government has previously engaged with other countries on how to adjust to the realities of the digital economy. Panellists agreed that IoT technology is still nascent, with full use of it being somewhere around five to 10 years away. In the meantime, consumers are still wary of connected devices. “We see that consumers don’t really trust…the privacy, they don’t trust the security,” Greg Walker, director of research at the Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA), said on the panel. He said that more than half of consumers have said in surveys “they don’t buy the products because they don’t trust that their data will be private.” “It shows we’re still in the early stages,” he said. Chapman also said when it comes to technology like IoT, Canada lags the U.S. by a year to 18 months in adoption, and when Canada sizes itself up against competitors, it should be against those south of the border and in Asia. “Ideally, what would happen, is that you’d have big players, some super interesting startups that have done great things abroad and you have academia and the government all there basically saying, ‘we’re open for business, we have a great story, our IoT is going to be a big deal in the future.’” But there are also other concerns for IoT. “The infrastructure that we’ve built is designed for web and mobile,” Chris Kay, co-founder of Multiplicity, a non-profit group supporting education in the Toronto startup community, said on the panel. “It’s not designed to interact with different objects…our phones aren’t designed for that many network connections…it’s going to destroy your battery, it’s going to destroy your connection.” Kay added that the “dream” of having everything connected is about five to 10 years away. He said the biggest hurdle is “understanding the underlying infrastructure,” so “in language that is IoT specific, that is not web or mobile, the encryption protocol...an actual standardized protocol for IoT, and backing from the telcos.” Telecom companies have been making steps toward 5G in recent months, testing the next generation of wireless technology that will support the IoT networks of the future. IoT devices are expected to grow 23 per cent every year between 2015 and 2021, according to a recent report. — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

National strategy on IoT needed: analyst

News | October 12, 2016

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National strategy on IoT needed: analyst

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