The Internet of Things is baaaack!
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Tue, Dec 15, 2009
As I think about all the great ideas born out of the 1999-era Auto-ID Center at MIT, I can't help relying on the old adage "timing is everything".
I took MIT's RFID summer course just a couple of years after the Auto-ID center was founded, and met Kevin MacDonald - one of ODIN's pillars, a five-year employee with a great reputation. I met and hired Dr. Daniel Engels (before most people could spell RFID). And I sat with Dr. Sanjay Sarma and discussed an "Internet of Things". It was his vision of the world if everything was connected.
Many people in RFID have scoffed at the IBM advertisement of a woman sitting behind a desk on a desolate road telling a truck to turn around because the RFID tags talked to her, but we aren't far from getting there and it looks like we are doing it with cooperation and oversight from the governemnt.
Last week I had the good fortune to speak at a symposium in Washington, DC about the Internet of Things. It was largely focused on policy and regulation and Gerald Santucci the head of the European Commission unit for ICT and RFID in DG Information Society and Media discussed the EU RFID recommendations and the EU Communication on the Internet of Things. Also present were several representatives from the Obama administration as well as their EU counterparts.
The big takeaway from the event was that the Internet of Things is being planned for; and is expected on both sides of the pond. There are many smart people making it as effective and safe as possible. Early pioneers from the registrar and domain name service (DNS) companies were there to lend their lessons learned creating the first scalable Internet (capital "I"). They reported we are only months away from not having fixed IP addresses from the governing bodies, because we are running out of IP numbers. Clearly the only solution is IPv6 - the latest version of the Internet Protocol. That will become very important for the Internet of Things.
The other curious bit of misinformation was that they thought RFID just worked no matter what, and that the object name service (ONS) was what people were using to route data. Fortunately there were several experts on the docket to dispel both those rumors. I did my best to educate on the physics of RFID and the limitations of passive read ranges and active battery size, for instance. I spent a lot of time on the benefits to everyday consumers, while others talked about how there are various "catalogs" to look up things like ONS. It was great to see policy makers get an education and take steps forward to help Dr. Sarma's vision step one foot closer to reality.