The recurring theme of the entire conference was the Internet of Things (IoT) or as Nitin Kiwale of Cisco called it, the Internet of Everything (IoE). Cisco is predicting that IoT will result in $14.4 trillion in business (cost savings, productivity gains, new revenues) for the private sector over the next decade, with an additional $4.6 trillion for the public sector. Let’s say they are high by a factor of ten. There is still a huge opportunity at stake.

The concept is that everything, your frig, your microwave, will have internet connectivity, to collect sensor data, for programming functionality. Transporation examples were the most frequently quoted example. Tracking of trucks, train cars, delivery vehicles, even packages. But there were other interesting examples too.

Scott Hoffpauir of Broadsoft discussed the example of Dejardins Insurance offering people the chance to “save” money on their insurance by monitoring their car driving habits and feed that into a network for analysis. But just imagine if someone hacked your driving record? My wife could have proof that I am a worse driver than her (that is a hypothetical example, as she is a worse driver than me).

Alec Saunders of QNX (Blackberry) discussed the recent story that a thief could hack his way to automatically open the door of your new Tesla!
These examples show just some of the many possible internet connections in the future. Wen Teng of Huawei was using the scenario of the number of internet connections growing from 10 billion today, to 100 billion connections in the near planning future!

The social implications of these connections are a little scary. But the impact on the telecom companies IP and optical backbones is very real and massive. Michael Murphy of Nokia stated that today’s networks are already too complex for a human to manage. Just imagine when we get to 100 billion connections!