Growth in the Internet of Things sector is being held back a “mess” of competing technologies and standards, new research has claimed.
According to a Machina Research report, there will need to be a small number of solutions across connectivity and service layers for the market to truly take off.
However, the market will not be won by one provider of wireless standards. It said: “Different technologies will be needed in different circumstances.”
The research firm believes the cross-industry OneM2M organisation should be the framework used to interface between different communication networks. It said it expected the debate around standards to move in the direction of discoverability, citing the work by the likes of HyperCat and AllJoyn. It said: “Standardisation will take time. We expect that the foreseeable future will be dominated by ‘Subnets of Things’ that coalesce around common ownership of data or common cause of data owners.”
The report’s author William Webb commented: “Currently, what has been termed the Internet of Things is a jumble of open and proprietary standards, with a lot of vertical and horizontal silos. Realistically, to move from this ‘Internet of Silos’ to the Internet of Things is going to require standardisation.
“The emergence of a small number of leading solutions in the various spaces of local connectivity, wide area connectivity and service or application layer would simplify application development and allow industry to coalesce around a few global standards.”
Matt Hatton, Director at Machina Research, added: “Clearly the development of standards is going to be critical for the Internet of Things to reach its huge potential. Today the IoT isn’t really worthy of the ‘Internet’ moniker. Greater standardisation is implicit in evolving from what we’ve previously termed machine-to-machine (M2M) to a true Internet of Things.”
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