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It may sound like another arcane bit of telco gear, but you’re likely much more familiar with policy engines than you might think. The policy server or manager is what throttles back your mobile broadband speeds when you exceed your monthly data quota, it tells your operator when you’ve been using your phone as a mobile hotspot on the sly, and it charges fees for services that some operators restrict like VoIP.

So what does a machine-to-machine (M2M) communications specialist like Jasper need with a high-powered policy engine? I put that question to Tekelec when we discussed the Jasper deal, and it turns out that policy is much more crucial to M2M and running vast networks of connected appliances and gadgets than I thought.

What it comes down to is that not all “things” in the internet of things are created equal, Tekelec Director of Strategic Marketing Joanne Steinberg said in an email interview. In the world of consumer applications, we chafe at the thought of one service or app being prioritized over another. But when we start talking about prioritizing devices, that all changes.

“For example, if I have a smartphone, a diabetes monitor, an alarm system and my child’s gaming device on a shared data plan, I may want my smartphone to have priority at certain times, and I would want my diabetes monitor and alarm system to always have a higher priority,” Steinberg said. “If I am an enterprise customer tracking multiple machines around the world, I may want my security cameras, safety and inventory tracking devices to have a higher priority than my vending machines.”

You don’t want your medical alert device to wait for a soda machine to finish uploading its inventory data before it transmits its emergency alert. Policy servers will assume the role of traffic cop not just over these millions of different connections, but the applications riding over them. A device like a security camera might normally have a low priority when it uploads its daily feeds to a video server, but when a crime is in progress the authorities need to see those video packets in real time.

What’s more, policy will pay a key role in billing for those different kinds of connections. In a world where millions of devices are always connected but only transmit intermittently, the concept of the monthly data plan goes out the window.

An individual customer could have millions of devices – for instance Amazon and its Kindles – sharing the same “quota pool,” Steinberg said, but in the case of M2M the value of a megabyte of data can vary greatly depending on the application. The amount of data an entire grid of smart utility meters could consume might be miniscule compared to the data a single tablet could eat up each month, but the utility would wind up paying far more due to the sheer number of connections supported.

“You can think of policy as the brain of the ‘Internet of Things’ because it intelligently defines the rules for all the ‘things’ that are and will be connected to the Internet based on network conditions, application and device priority, speed and bandwidth requirements, time of day and so on,” Steinberg said. “It will determine, when different devices and applications will have priority, what bandwidth and speed will be assigned, when to send alerts or new service and software updates – the list is endless!”

We’re going to see these kind of policy rules set not just in the internet of things, but in the plain old internet of phones and phones. Carriers are already weighing a new type of tiered plan, in which the tiers aren’t determined by monthly data allowances, but by service quality. It might not be much longer before we have the option to pay higher rates each month to ensure our traffic is sent via network fast lanes. Of course, if we opt not to play those higher rates, we might just get stuck in the on-ramp.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Lightspring

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Brazilian location-services company Cargo Tracck is working with the Brazilian environmental protection authorities and carriers to stop deforestation in the Amazon through the tracking of individual trees. By embedding Gemalto machine-to-machine (M2M) radio modules into specially designed logging monitors, Cargo Tracck is able to detect if trees are being chopped down and moved.

It’s a unique approach to M2M because it requires monitoring devices in areas where cellular networks usually don’t reach — the depths of the rainforest. The genius of Cargo Tracck’s system though is that in an ideal situation the monitoring devices will never have to transmit.

If the protected trees remain undisturbed, the modules would just hang unmolested in the forest canopy. But if the tree were cut down and trucked to an illegal sawmill, the monitor would notify the authorities as soon as it got within range of a cellular network. Gemalto’s newest low-power M2M modules use radiation exchange data tracking technologies that can extend its range 20 miles, so they can transmit their coordinates even if illegal loggers are skirting cities and highways.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user .curt.

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Moj.io, a current project trying to raise $100,000 in funding on Indiegogo, takes advantage of the OBD, or on-board diagnostics, port found in all cars built on or after 1995. The ODB port is mainly intended for auto shops to connect to and get information from a vehicle’s computer to assist with diagnosing problems. But it can be used in a real-time mode for data such as speed, fuel levels and more.

Getting at that data is only part of the solution, however. The small Moj.io module integrates both a GPS and cellular radio to gather location information and for connectivity. The GSM radio inside uses T-Mobile’s network for M2M, or machine to machine, data transfers, sending data up to the cloud.

From there it’s accessible through a smartphone app and the Moj.io team already has eight in mind:

1. Family Connect can notify you when another driver in the household exceeds a pre-set speed limit. (Sorry teens!)
2. Drive Smart disables incoming texts and calls when the car is in motion. You can allow incoming calls from three pre-determined contacts, however.
3. Vehicle Locate does what it says: Shows your vehicle on a map and provides walking directions to it.
4. Tow Alert notifies you if your car is broken into or being towed away.
5. Mileage Tracker eliminates the need to manually track miles for business expensing.
6. Auto Text is perhaps the most impressive to me. Upon starting a drive, the app checks your calendar for any appointments within the next hour. It can then send a text message to any meeting participants, telling them how far away you are and when you should arrive.
7. Virtual Mechanic provides basic diagnostic information and fuel levels.
8. Good Driver Points sounds like a rewards system that will earn perks in the future.

To back the project as an early adopter and get the lowest price will cost $89 which is a $60 savings over the expected retail price. There’s more to the system than just the module though: Expect to pay $7.99 per month to cover the Moj.io’s cellular service. Again, backing early will save you some money: You’ll get three months service for free. And all backers will get a special yearly subscription price of $79 to cover the connectivity.

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Some of the same names pop up in both announcements, specifically ARM, the British chip-design powerhouse whose architecture underpins almost every mobile processor out there, and white space comms pioneer Neul, a firm that boasts some of the UK’s leading lights in the wireless space.

One must have standards

Let’s tackle the standards thing first, as that’s going to be utterly crucial in the development of the internet of things, or machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, as it has more traditionally been known. Here’s a great explanation from Kevin as to why standards are so important here – it also lists some of the rival standards initiatives that are going on.

The Weightless standard we’re concerned with here comes from Neul, which was founded by veterans of Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) and other top ‘Silicon Fen’ firms.

The royalty-free open standard exploits the so-called ‘white spaces’ between TV transmissions, which are there to avoid interference between the transmission but which can generally be used for short-to-medium-range wireless communications without causing too many problems. The only hitch I can see with this approach is the fact that white space usage is not permissible in every country – it depends on the disposition of the national telecoms regulator.

Weightless was unveiled last year, and now it has a special interest group (SIG) to push it worldwide. SIGs are basically partnerships, and this one’s a doozy: apart from Neul and ARM (also from the Cambridge region), it also includes CSR and Cable & Wireless Worldwide.

“This is a very important milestone for Weightless,” Neul CEO William Webb said. “The SIG now has a board comprising leading players spanning processors, networks, chipsets and innovative wireless technologies. Weightless has gained a solid legal framework enabling royalty-free licensing of terminal-related technology. Our plan is to rapidly grow membership from our current base of 50 high-technology companies and I would strongly encourage interested parties to join this world-changing initiative.”

ARM CTO Mike Muller – whose company must be licking its lips at the ginormous market represented by the internet of things – gave a timely reminder of the kind of use cases we’re looking at here: “the next wave of connectivity across smart grids, enhanced healthcare, smart cities, asset tracking, sensors and future applications as yet unimagined”.

Stimulation too

Over to that other announcement now. This one’s from Springboard, an accelerator program that straddles London and Cambridge, and it involves the establishment of a three-month ‘accelerator bootcamp’.

This time, ARM and Neul are joined by consumer goods behemoth Unilever and the folks behind the Raspberry Pi ultra-cheap computer project (which, you guessed it, is also based in Cambridge).

The program will accept 10 teams in any area of internet-of-things tech, and give founders over $150k-worth of free services, seed capital and mentoring. Needless to say, the mentors are of a pretty high standard – they’ve even got Hermann Hauser.

I’ll skip the quotes from the big players on this one and go straight to Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton:

“To date, the internet of things has been largely the playground of corporates. Dramatically falling hardware costs are shifting innovation toward smaller teams in a similar manner to how web technologies have evolved over the last 10 years.”

It’s very interesting to see the UK staking its claim in the internet of things, and it does make complete sense. Companies such as ARM and CSR have made their names in the low-power wireless stakes, and that’s what this sector is all about.

And now their push is beginning in earnest. Game on.

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To outline what still needs to be done, and give governments a framework for understanding how 50 billion devices could be connected in the next 8 years, the OECD has released a report laying out the needs of an M2M network and the tradeoffs associated wtih different technologies. It offers a few interesting use cases, as well, although the focus is more squarely on the practicalities of making it work. As usual, it starts with the networks.

The networks

The OECD breaks down the needs depending on the type of device and its function, basically if a device moves or not, and then how far it moves. For highly mobile devices that travel around the world, we’re actually short on options, but cellular is probably the best bet. For stationary devices in the home, power line communications or Wi-Fi could offer compelling options. However, with each technology there are tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs become magnified if you’re considering connections for products designed to be used globally.

For example, cellular technology has drawbacks because 2G networks, which are fairly ubiquitous are also being phased out, and the lifetime of a connected device may stretch for decades (think of how long you keep your fridge or a bike. However 3G networks aren’t going to arrive everywhere, which means some places might then never have a connection. Imagine if you had a pet tracking service for Fido that used 3G and Fido wandered out of a coverage zone. LTE and 4G might seem like a good solution for offering the longest time until obsolescence, but right now radios suck power and networks are thin on the ground.

Each wireline and wireless network technology offers drawbacks of this nature plus those associated with costs, reliability and security. It’s enough to make one’s head spin, or to at least hope that someone might combine a variety of services under one roof and just offer connectivity packages.

The role of wholesalers.

It’s not that companies don’t want to take on the role of aggregating connectivity for customers, but that the wholesale market for access has a few roadblocks, according to the report. One roadblock is how devices will be identified on M2M networks. From IP addresses to individual mobile subscriber numbers, there are a variety of ways to authenticate devices on a network. But not all methods of identification are available to everyone.

In some cases the government will only allow telecom providers to offer identifying numbers, which means only they can provide service for M2M communications. The OECD believes that will keep prices high and limit the market. That brings us to the role governments will have to play in the creation of a viable system. From the report:

Access to a unique and verifiable identity is another important requirement for many M2M applications. The model provided by SIM-cards seems to offer a great deal of flexibility and possibilities. There are other ways of providing a secure identity, but using a SIM-card chip soldered onto a motherboard or integrated into a chipset appears to be a very cost-effective method of providing security. As regulators play an important role in assigning SIM-card numbers (so called ESN-numbers) they will have to take this role into account in terms of the future of M2M.

The role of regulation

In asking governments to rethink their regulatory environment for a new age of communications built on IP networks and between people, machines and back-end computers processing data, the report hits on an increasingly common problem of the Internet age. Ironically, a decade or so after IP communications became widespread in the U.S. we are only now getting to a place in our regulatory regime where the government is discussing how this changes the way laws should be written and enforced. Legislation and regulation lagging the marketplace isn’t new, but the OECD report makes a good first step in understanding one of the next regulatory battles looming on the horizon.

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