In the UK, some members of the smart metering programme have begun asking these questions, potentially for the wrong reasons.  They’ve realised that ZigBee – the current front-runner for the UK smart metering deployment, can’t provide the range to cope with every single house or block of flats, and have started wondering about whether it might make sense to start again from scratch.

A few years ago, when I was writing my book on the Essentials of Short Range Wireless I attempted to put some numbers to those questions.  It seems an appropriate time to publish them, as the answers are a lot more and a lot longer than most people think.

Most of the short range wireless standards we know today started their lives at the end of the 1990s.  At the time, even those involved in developing them were rather naïve about the time it would take.  I recall sitting in early standards meetings for most of them, being shown roadmaps that would lead to completed specifications and real consumer products within eighteen to twenty-four months.  Bluetooth even set itself up with the anticipation that everything would be done and dusted within three years and the board could then be disbanded.  Despite the early optimism, it didn’t happen that way for any of them.

The first question in trying to assess the cost for developing a standard is how to assess the end point, when it can be considered to be complete.  It’s a difficult call, as we’ve seen each of the short range standards go through multiple versions as they try to solve the two most intransigent issues – security and interoperability.  So I’ve made a unilateral decision, which is the point at which the standard has shipped fifty million chips.

Fifty million seems a valid estimate for a number of reasons.  Firstly you don’t really discover the state of your security until you’ve shipped around that number of devices.  The reason is simple – it’s because most hackers, whether ethical or otherwise, won’t bother trying to break a new standard until there are a few tens of millions of devices on the market, because there’s not much kudos in cracking something no-one’s aware of.  So fifty million is enough to get them interested and find the problems.  And it gives developers time to try and fix the first few security flaws.  That generally needs a number of releases of a standard.  How quickly that’s done depends on the critical mass of developers contributing to it, which takes us neatly back to the volume of chips being shipped.  Success brings resources into the process.  Looking at the three main short range wireless standards, it took them around seven years to get security right. 

Time to get security right

These are subjective times.  Bluetooth took a little longer because it does more things.  The point I’ve chosen for Bluetooth was the release of the 2.1 version of the standard, which introduced Secure Simple Pairing.  Wi-Fi finally got its house in order with the release of WPA2, and ZigBee with the ZigBee PRO release and the Smart Energy Profile, which mandated its use.  All of them will probably need further releases as hackers discover issues, but for now they’re all considered fit for purpose.

The second reason for selecting the fifty million metric is interoperability.  Interoperability is something that takes time.  In the first few years of a standard there are relatively few devices available and their manufacturers collaborate closely to make sure they work.  As the standard takes off, an increasing number of companies making products begins to expose areas which are open to interpretation, requiring further revisions of the standard and the development of more robust certification programmes.  The time to reach that point is not dissimilar to the time to get security right. 

Time to achieve interoperability

I’d argue that interoperability only really arrives when you can test your product against a test harness, rather than against golden units, by which definition ZigBee is still on the path towards attaining it.  And the more optional features a specification has, the more difficult it is to achieve interoperability.  It’s a long, slow road, but all three are now well down it.

Comparing these times against how long it takes to reach the 50 million mark, it looks as if 50 million might be an over-optimistic figure.  But I’d argue that it’s still a relatively good point to look at costs.  By this stage in their evolution, standards will have started to settle down and if they’re lucky, seen the hockey stick of growth begins to kick in.  After that, making cost comparisons becomes less meaningful as investment will move from standards evolution to commercial volume.

It takes different standards varying amounts of time to get to this level of shipments.  Standards like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi got the benefit of a “free ride” as they were incorporated into mobile phones and laptops before many people used them.  This gave the industry the income to support standards development and spin several generations of chips, both of which help to advance the standard to a robust level of maturity.  In contrast, ZigBee and most of its fellow standards never got this helping hand.  Because they came into existence as the primary, and often the only means for a device to communicate, they had to earn their living in every product that employed them.   That’s a much more difficult challenge, which means it took them a lot longer to reach that important fifty million mark. 

Time to reach the 50 million shipment mark

You can debate the exact starting point for any of these standards.  Wi-Fi is a good example, as it has a long history, dating back to 1988, when it originated as the proprietary WaveLAN standard.  During the 1990s it was adopted and advanced by the IEEE as the 802.11 standard, but it wasn’t until they started work on 802.11b, operating at 2.4GHz, that the scene was set for Wi-Fi as we know it today.  But that’s true for most wireless standards – they’re preceded by up to a decade of proprietary or academic development.

So what does that mean in terms of cost?  To try and assess this I added up the Venture Capital investment that went into start-up companies working on each of the standards to get them to this point, along with an estimate of the costs of internal development for established companies.  To that I added the acquisition costs paid by companies to acquire start-ups who had developed relevant technology.  As standards are developed by engineers who are funded by their companies, I’ve also tried to estimate what that might be, as it’s a substantial outlay.  I’ve not included any end product development costs – these are purely the costs associated with the development of the standard and the silicon development required to get the first 50 million chips to market.  (For the purists, that also includes some Gallium Arsenide development in the Bluetooth figure.)  The numbers don’t include any revenue from these chip sales – it’s just the cost to make them happen.  Adding everything up produces the following estimates for the total development cost for each of these standards to reach the 50 million chip number:

Costs to reach the 50 million chip shipment point

For all of these standards, the evolution was broadly similar.  The standard starts with a mix of large companies, and start-ups which rely on VC funding.  As the standard takes off, more of these start-up companies are acquired by existing semiconductor companies who either did not start their own development, or wish to acquire some market-leading technology that came from a start-up.  At some point after the 50 million mark is reached there’s usually one successful start-up left which has a dominant position, with the rest having fallen by the wayside, or having been acquired.  For Bluetooth that’s CSR, for Wi-Fi it was Atheros (although they were acquired by Qualcomm last year) and for ZigBee it’s Ember.  The cost of Bluetooth is inflated in the table above by the feeding frenzy that occurred as established chip companies paid over the odds for some of the start-ups when they realised they were lagging behind the market leaders.

What this demonstrates is that it’s not cheap to develop wireless standards.   To get a standard to a state that’s fit for market costs around a billion dollars.  The reason that companies take this gamble is the potential scale of sales if the standard takes off.  Despite the frightening $2 billion price tag for developing Bluetooth, the annual revenue for Bluetooth chips exceeds that and will probably continue to do so for at least the next decade.  And once a standard has reached that level, incremental developments become cost effective.  The same economics apply to Wi-Fi, which is not far behind in terms of shipments.  But it’s increasingly difficult to repeat that trick and will become more so in the future.  That’s because the cost of designing chips is rising.  A recent analysis of chip development costs from Gartner illustrates that they are growing inexorably as device geometries shrink.

The rising cost of chip design

At the time that the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ZigBee standards started being developed, it cost around $3 million to get a new radio chip to market, with around the same again for firmware.  Today most designers approaching a new chip would probably start working with a 65nm process.  To reach the 50 million mark, along with the evolution of security and interoperability, requires around five different vendors spinning several versions of their silicon – realistically a total of a dozen different chips.  At Gartner’s estimate of $50 million per chip, that’s a starting cost of $600 million, just for the silicon.  This means that any organisation driving a new standard needs to have a convincing argument that it has the potential to sell over a billion chips every year.  Otherwise the companies involved in it will not recoup their investment.

That’s the reason that most of the recent “standards” which have appeared are essentially proprietary solutions, led by a single chip vendor.  That’s not to say that there are no new opportunities.  DECT ULE and Bluetooth Smart (previously known as Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth Ultra Low Power and Wibree, which indicates that a standard can devour quite a lot of marketing money as well) have both built new standards on the back of existing expertise.  Even these take time – around 10 years for DECT ULE and six years for Bluetooth Smart, and precious few products are available on the market yet for either of them. 

It’s questionable how much room there is for another standard within the existing spectrum allocations.  However, there is the siren call of brave new spectrum in the form of white space, which is waiting to be conquered by the likes of Neul (who gave us CSR and much of Bluetooth).  That may well be the best opportunity for anything fundamentally new in wireless standards – so keep an eye on the Weightless SIG.

Against the reality of the development costs and time, it is both simplistic and dangerous to argue for new spectrum and new standards just because you don’t like what’s already there, or because you think it’s less than perfect.  But in theUK, that’s a mantra that is being chanted by some of those involved in the smart metering specifications.  It’s a nonsense approach. 

Developing a new wireless standard is a serious undertaking.  Thinking you can take a radio and a couple of protocols and whisk them together like Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver to produce something better is a recipe for disaster.  Good wireless standards take time.  And anything other than good wireless standards tend to sacrifice security and interoperability, making them a very dangerous and short-sighted waste of time.

There’s a long tradition of resetting opera to make satirical points.  Ned Sherrin and Alistair Beaton did it in the Kinnock and Thatcher era with the Metropolitan Mikado and the Ratepayer’s Iolanthe.  More recently Music Theatre London set the trend for pithy new translations which led to a resurgence of exciting new small scale opera productions.  But we seem to have lost the politics.

Rigoletto feels as if its authors had anticipated our most recent political incumbents – the powerful, confident stride of Blair the leader, imperiously parting the faithful as he strides with his sycophantic train to the dais.  And in the shadows the poison dwarf, reviled by the rest of the party, who will ultimately aid his leader’s downfall, played by Alistair Campbell.  I often thought there was great scope for a New Labour Rigoletto with that pair and possibly Prescott as a lumbering Sparafucile.  But the opportunity passed by.

However, when Andrew Lansley started putting forward his health reforms, with the Lib-Dems performing U-turns on a daily basis I realised that the music and story fitted the current administration just as well. 

David Cameron is a slightly more human and certainly weaker Count, ruled more by his courtiers than his own belief.  Clegg provides an excellent Rigoletto, always torn between fawning for appreciation and wanting to speak his own mind, but never sure which particular claque he needs to win favour with on the day.  And Lansley can play the role of assassin – happy to perform the unpleasant cuts, but feared by the back benchers because in the land of the spineless, the man who holds to his belief, however mistaken, is king.

I’ve not got the resources to produce an opera, but it struck me that the wooden performances and lack of imagination of this trio could be put to good use as the subject for an automaton.  As well as the three conflicting personalities of the opera, they felt equally appropriate to be depicted as that triumvirate of far from wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.  Much cutting, experimenting and building later, I offer you “Shaking up the NHS”.

I can’t deny that it has a political message – it does, although it’s not a party political one.  The NHS needs to change.  The changing demographics in the UK mean we have more elderly people who need health services and fewer in work to pay for that cost.  When the NHS was set up, treatments were generally simple and inexpensive and life expectancy was lower.  Today treatment costs more, more of us need those treatments and a smaller percentage of the population is working and contributing taxes to pay for them. 

The simplistic cries to maintain public services or keep our hands off the NHS don’t add up – that’s trying to rewrite basic mathematics.  We cannot run a health service on credit, which means we need to make very major changes to the way that society keeps itself healthy and pays for the NHS.  Whilst I’m poking fun at our politicians, the answer we need to find will be far more radical than the reforms currently fighting their way through Parliament.  That programme is laughable in its naivety and more likely to cause damage that positive change.  You can read more on that elsewhere in the blog – particularly why I think we should not limit our vision, but consider making the NHS a global brand.

But it’s been nice to channel that into something as fun as this automaton.  I’ve enjoyed making it.  I hope you enjoy watching it.  And if anyone wants some ideas for a new translation of Rigoletto, let me know.

 Watch it again at www.nhsvideo.com

For some reason, we love switching.  Our favourite TV adverts are for comparison sites.  One – the advert for Compare the Market uses a family of animated meerkats which have become so popular they’ve spawned a range of merchandise.  Whether it’s insurance, energy, mobile phone plans, broadband or saving plans, we’re addicted.  And nowhere more so than with switching energy provider.

It’s not just the websites urging us to do that.  Government ministers keep on telling us that to get the best energy price we should switch suppliers.  Their message is not to use less energy – just change supplier.  And part of their plan for smart metering is to make it even easier to switch – as often as once a day.  It’s creating a very interesting dynamic for the industry, but one that is about to change.

If you live outside the UK this may sound strange.  For large parts of the world, particularly for many households within the USA, energy companies have not been deregulated.  As far as the world’s greatest democracy is concerned, for most users energy supply still follows a Stalinist approach where you have no choice but to buy your energy from the local “benevolent” state monopoly. 

In the UK, the energy industry was deregulated in the late 1990s.  This split the network generators and retailers, allowing customers to buy gas and electricity from any of the energy companies.  The hope was that this would introduce competition which would benefit the customer.  Whether that has been achieved is debatable – initial choice was rapidly eroded though consolidation within the industry, limiting the scope for innovation.  Although deregulation gives customers choice, the problem is that there’s not a lot of ways to differentiate electricity or gas.  It’s like petrol or water – they’re petrol or water (unless you’re in the US, when they’re gas and water).  The only real differentiator is customer service, which is something for which utilities are not famous.

The EU and Australia have followed the same route.  The US started to follow, only to cut the experiment short, leaving enclaves of deregulation in a largely sceptical nation.  There’s a wonderfully rabid diatribe about the UK experience that the Consumer’s Union produced in 2003, claiming that the UK public was manipulated, misled, ignored and abused , which is still well worth reading.  But however persuasive or accurate it may or may not have been at the time, the Enron experience did a far better job of halting progress.

For UK consumers, deregulation has been a bitter-sweet experience.  The growth of Internet companies which help us switch, along with some questionable doorstep sales techniques have turned us into a nation of switchers.  Most householders would question the benefits they’ve attained by switching as bills still seem to go up.  To be fair, that’s not necessarily duplicity on the part of the utilities.   When basic prices continue to rise, then regardless of whether you switch, your bill is likely to increase.  As users have little feedback on what they actually consume (how many of us actually check the annual consumption on our energy bill?), the perception is that prices rise inexorably regardless of switching, hence it’s all a con.  Despite which we all keep on doing it.

This switching behaviour has become the focus for the way the industry works in deregulated markets, and imparts an important difference between the US and the rest of the world.  The concept of annual switching grew out of the mobile phone (cellular) industry, where the growth of personal handsets sent the network operators into a frenzy of customer acquisition.  UK mobile phone ownership hit 75% in 2003.  That marked the point where growth from first time customers started to come to an end.  For the next seven years, the only way UK networks perceived that they could grow was by persuading customers to switch, largely regardless of cost.  Eventually the mobile industry learnt and started to concentrate more on customer retention and growing ARPU through longer contracts and added services.

In the UK the utilities followed this same model.  They had a slightly different starting point as there was no real customer growth – everyone already had an electricity or gas supplier, and new build homes were a limited additional market.   So they embraced switching with enthusiasm.  Anyone offering analytics to a supplier would discover that the three drivers in utility marketing were acquisition, acquisition and acquisition, with a grudging bit of engagement and retention.  Because of this, energy conservation – a business model which has driven analytics companies like OPower in the US, has been largely absent in deregulated markets, unless backed by Government reimbursement programs such as the UK’s CERT scheme.  And even there, money has been channelled into more direct engagement solutions – typically energy monitors.  But in the single minded pursuit of customer acquisition, the industry has slid into some shady doorstep sales techniques.

The bubble burst just before Christmas 2008, when nPower were fined £1.8 million by OFGEM for misselling.  More prosecutions followed, and by the end of 2011, all but one of the major utilities announced that they would stop doorstep sales.  As a result, switching has slumped, falling from 26% to less than 14% over the year.  And recent Goverment figures for the last quarter of 2011 show it’s still falling along with the statement that “turst in energy firms has never been lower”.

Despite continuing Government calls to keep on doing it, switching is set to fall further.  Doorstep sales counted for a large percentage of acquisitions and that’s gone.  The next largest chunk was driven by discounts given to switching sites.  That’s disappearing too, as energy companies have decided to use that money to reduce tariffs.  It’s a move that will probably see another halving in switching, decreasing it to something between 5% and 8%.

It means a whole new marketing game plan for the UK energy industry.  The reduction in web discounts is a response to complaints from consumer groups about complex tariffs.  Unlike US energy companies, who generally only offer two or three different tariffs, UK companies have historically offered hundreds, and in some cases thousands, including some long standing Time of Use tariffs.  They’ve been stung by allegations from consumer groups that this makes it very difficult for customers to understand whether they are on the right one, and there is evidence that a lot of customers are not. 

Although the market is dominated by six large utilities, the past few years have seen the introduction of new entrants, encouraged by OFGEM’s policy of encouraging innovation in supply, who are concerned that competition is being stifled.  Faced with the possibility of more nimble competition, it makes total sense for the big six to stop buying customers (who are likely to keep on switching) with web discounts, but use this money to support a simplified tariff structure, which they can claim leads to lower prices for consumers.

And that’s what’s happening.  But it means a massive change in business model as they now need to concentrate of extracting value from long term customers.  Which means concentrating on customer engagement and selling new services.  That is a difficult challenge for any industry.  It’s a massive challenge for the utilities, where risk aversion and slow, careful deliberation is the order of the day.  To make it more difficult, this is happening at exactly the same time as the UK is starting its smart meter rollout – itself a major step change in technology and IT complexity for these companies.

The UK is taking a dramatic lead with its smart metering deployment, designing a system for the most complex energy market in the world.  The structural changes in the industry described above lay a further level of complexity which makes this even more challenging.  What is apparent is that utilities will need to rely on external expertise more than ever before to transform their industry through the next five years.  And rely on sectors with which they have previously had little engagement, for many of the skills they need lie outside the energy industry.

What does it mean for the switching public?  It looks as if they may change their switching behaviour, at least for energy suppliers, despite the best protestations of government ministers and consumer groups.  I don’t think they’ll stop switching; they’ll just turn to purchases other than energy.  That is, until the energy industry makes it interesting for them to start switching again.  My suspicion is that will not be because of price, but because of other services, which have yet to be defined. 

Which presents a challenge for the energy retailers.  For the foreseeable future, customers are likely to remain surprisingly loyal, even in the face of rising energy prices.  However, the first utility to offer compelling new services will have the opportunity to disrupt the market and move to the number one slot.  What makes this even more worrying for the competition is that they will probably achieve through acquisition of the most profitable segment of customers from their rivals.  So the race is on to find and provide that service and change the face of energy retailing.

And Government will need to change its advice.  As tariffs become simpler and more similar, and as web discounts disappear, an exhortation to switch has little value and soon becomes meaningless.  Instead, ministers need to think about the more difficult problem of how to persuade people to change their energy use, including what steps they need to take to promote that change of behaviour.  And switching government policy is likely to be the most difficult switch of all.

Before you dismiss it, stop and think.  We’ve already done it with the BBC, which Superbrands rates as the fifth strongest brand in the UK.  The BBC is respected and earns money around the world.  Why don’t we think of the NHS in the same way?  It doesn’t feature in any list of brands because nobody thinks of it like that.  But there are some very good reasons why it should, particularly if we want it to be affordable in the future.  The current Government (and every one before it) is missing a trick.

The NHS probably contains more data about treatment and outcomes than any other medical institution in the world.  And so it should.  For much of its life it’s been one of the world’s largest employers, accumulating detailed information on generations of the UK’s 60 million citizens.  That’s an awful lot of “big data”.   So here’s the question – “If we could extract and monetise that value, could we make the NHS pay for itself?”  We need to extract that value and use it, then export the resulting expertise to make money from the rest of the world.

The crux comes down to the way we think about the NHS.  As it has evolved, there has been a parallel evolution of a culture of entitlement, generating a widespread view that the NHS should meet every demand of every person.  That has helped feed into the demand for more and more.  Whilst that is significantly different from the initial view of the NHS, generations of politicians of every political persuasion have been loath to be seen resisting this expansion.  Every time they do, the spectre of privatisation is raised, heralding frenzied wails from the media about the impending death of the NHS.  Hence we are where we are today.

And that’s the way everyone involved with it now sees it – as an ever greater consumer of resource.  Which blinds everyone from thinking about how to make the NHS a source of revenue itself.  There’s been a lot of talk and money put into trying to make it more efficient, but never really from a business viewpoint.  That would mean considering how to run the NHS as a business, rather than a service, but is that a bad thing?  Anyone who saw the BBC documentary “Can Gerry Robinson fix the NHS” will remember his amazement at seeing the operating theatre left idle most of the time.  That’s not an imperative to privatise, but a recognition about how to make the most if its assets.

One of the NHS’ key assets is its data.  If it could be assembled into one database and mined for its value it would have the power of life and death.   Quite literally.  That data may well contain enough information on actual drug usage to put one pharmaceutical company out of business and double the value of another.  It could bring an additional level of data into NICE that they would die for.  And let’s not forget that NICE is one of the UK’s greatest assets, not the undeserving butt of every media attack on access to medication.  We need to start respecting our sources of value.

The problem about “big data” is that it’s something that so few people comprehend, particularly those in Government.  Rather than being promoted for its value, it is more regularly demonised for its Big Brother associations.  But in the UK we’re good at working with it.

Not many people know that the UK leads the world in the use of data analysis, where financial services organisations in the City and Tesco on every High Street have transformed the way that data can add value and competitiveness to an industry.  If we could only generate a data culture within the NHS we could apply that power to make money to help fund our healthcare.  Properly used and directed, it has the potential to transform the NHS and elevate the associated medical industries to the position of global leadership.

The McKinsey Global Institute recently published a report on Big Data.  They call it the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.  In the report they look at the productivity gains that can come from a culture of analysing and using data.  They estimate the US has the potential to save $300 billion every year from their healthcare budget by making more use of healthcare data.  That’s largely in productivity, before you start to realise its wider value.

McKinsey cite positive moves that are already happening within the UK, notably the work being done by Dr. Foster Intelligence, who trade under the banner of “better information, better health”.  And there are signs of a wider understanding already starting to percolate in the recent NHS proposal on Innovation, Health and Wealth.  In this document, there is an acknowledgement that the UK can develop best practice and export it.  However, it accepts that the NHS has not always responded systematically to requests from abroad.  It points out that “the international healthcare market is worth more than $4 trillion a year, and NHS must do more to exploit the commercial value of its knowledge, information, ideas and people”.

The same document announces the desire for the NHS to accelerate the use of assistive technologies, aiming to improve at least 3 million lives over the next five years.  That’s possible because of the largely unnoticed work that has been taking place here in the UK by moving telecare to scale, notably the Whole System Demonstration Program, which is one of the leading examples of large scale telecare deployment anywhere in the world.  Its successor – the Dallas Program, taken alongside this call for the deployment of telecare to three million patients, places the UK ahead of the rest of the world.  We need to understand how to profit from that knowledge.

There is a recognition of this in the announcement of a new £180 million fund from the Government to support the “next brilliant medical breakthroughs”.  However, this still shows a limited understanding of the true value of patient data.  A similar sentiment was obvious in the proposal for the UK’s Strategy on Life Sciences published last December, which acknowledges the potential for using patient data to enhance the UK’s in vitro diagnostics industry to establish the UK as the global leader.  David Cameron was correct in talking about the opportunities from the Open Data Agenda when he pointed out the value of this data to the life sciences market.  Life Sciences is the third largest contributor to UK economic growth, with an annual turnover of £50 billion.  We should be aiming for an even more efficient partnership.

That’s because medicine is beginning to change.  Eric Topol has been a advocate for this new paradigm of personal medicine for many years, cogently explaining it in his recent book “The Creative Destruction of Medicine“.  Once again, it’s an evolution that will be built on data, where better knowledge of each individual will allow medicines to be targeted, rather than applied with the traditional broad brush.  The country with the largest medical database to share with the next generation of emerging personal pharmaceutical developers will reap enormous rewards.  The NHS is ideally placed to dominate this evolution as well.

However, as the McKinsey report points out, one of the key problems in getting there is the shortage of people who understand data.  The biggest challenge for the NHS is in how to access it.  It is sobering to consider that we are not pioneering paperless hospitals – that’s being left to countries like Pakistan.

This highlights a problem which the current reforms are side-stepping – how do we bring innovation into the NHS.  As Clayton Christensen points out in “The Innovator’s Prescription“, we are still training medics for a healthcare system that disappeared fifty years ago.  The Guardian recently wondered what happens to all the bright IT-literate junior doctors, lamenting the way they change from technology champions into good ol’ hospital boys resisting change.  Our inability to change the way things are done is the biggest obstacle we face.  Returning to Clayton he is succinct in his analysis:  “Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct.  There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk.  But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find you have been passed by”.

What the NHS needs is more innovation, not shuffling its ownership from one group of technology deniers to another.  The current reforms don’t tackle innovation, they merely move the chairs around.  We should all be justifiably proud of what the NHS has achieved, but set our sights higher to envisage how much more it could become.  With its wealth of data it could fund innovation, providing a true evidence-based system to provide the knowledge for more effective healthcare and the data insight to feed a global medical industry based in the UK.  But to achieve that we need to think on a grander scale.  Today too much happens without scale – it’s “local innovation for local trusts”.  We need a culture that quickly moves through national to international.

The NHS desperately needs visionaries who can think on a broader scale and embrace the concept of the NHS as a global brand.  Healthcare is a global problem that is not going to go away.  In most of the world it is far more fragmented than it is in the UK.  Which means that we are well placed to deploy at scale to take on the world.  That needs the NHS to evolve a global vision.  Let’s not miss this opportunity, but seize it.  If we get it right we can sell it to the world and make the NHS a global brand.  So let’s set out sights on excellence, with the vision that we can achieve something that others will pay to take advantage of.  The goal should be no less than creating an NHS healthcare system so good that the likes of the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente would queue up to buy a franchise.  That’s what reform should be about.

Up until now this was mostly an annoyance, largely because it was a personal problem.  By that I mean it was an inconvenient truth that individuals discovered when they bought a consumer wireless product, whether that was a Wi-Fi access point, a cordless phone or a mobile headset.  As these were generally low cost, discretionary purchases, users either took them back, put them in a cupboard and forgot about them, or worked around the problem by moving the appropriate access point.  For the more technically engaged, a raft of companies grew up making repeaters, range extenders, power amplifiers and directional antennae, allowing users to exacerbate the problem by swamping all of their neighbours’ installations.

In the last year people have started to take the middle word of “short range wireless” rather more seriously.  That’s come about as governments around the world have mandated deployments of smart meters.  Whilst no-one cared too much if a consumer product didn’t work, smart meters are a different kettle of fish.  They need to be able to connect with the other components of the smart metering wireless network in the home in order to send consumption data back to the utilities.  They have to do that reliably and regularly over a period of many years.  And they need to be able to cope with a wide variety of homes – from small bungalows to multi-storey apartment buildings.  All of a sudden that “range” word is getting a lot of attention.

The problem is that the wireless standards being considered don’t cover 100% of different homes.  Any one standard probably struggles with covering much more than 75% of potential homes.  That’s a big problem for regulators and civil servants who have a very black and white view of life – when a mandate says “all”, they assume that means every last home.  So what can they do?

In an ideal world the governments who are mandating smart metering should have started to think about the problem ten years ago.  That would have given them time to release an appropriate chunk of RF spectrum and work with standards groups to define a suitable protocol.  Needless to say, they didn’t, which gets us to where we are today with a raft of competing short range wireless standards all arguing that they have the best solution.  That’s marketing weasel words; none of them do, at least in their present form.  Each has made inevitable compromises between range, security, power consumption and bandwidth – that’s what wireless standards are all about (for more on which, buy the book or read some of my previous posts).  It doesn’t mean that they couldn’t evolve to solve range, but that’s not been their first priority.  Goverments also have another problem, which is their politics, as there are certain civil servants involved with smart metering in Europe who have very limited ideas regarding what a standard is and whether anyone is allowed to use some of them.     

But range has become top of the list for governments and utilities, not least because it’s one of the easiest things to measure.  Or is it?  Surprisingly, very little work has been done to evaluate it.  One of the best analyses comes from Australia.  Australia has a particular problem in that they install meters in metal boxes on the outside of a house – something that most RF engineers refer to as a Faraday cage.  The report looked at the effect this has on the range of ZigBee at 2.4GHz.  Sadly the report isn’t public, but its main conclusions have been disclosed at a number of conferences, which are that the range from ZigBee devices was perfectly adequate in most homes, but that they would benefit from have an additional repeater somewhere in its middle, operating at 100mW 

The main conclusion, which is that ZigBee worked most of the time, tended to get eclipsed by the predictable recommendation of upping the power, based on the old principle that if you shout louder, you’re more likely to be heard.  It’s a less than valid corollary that is far more prevalent than it deserves to be and decidedly problematic in the real world.

Because adding a repeater as a solution is not as easy as it sounds.  The cost of adding it is one issue, but a bigger one is how to power it?  Today the only products that a utility needs to monitor your power consumption are an electricity meter and a gas meter.  The electricity meter is self-powered and the gas meter has a big battery in it.  If a repeater is added next to the electricity meter, where it can be powered from the main electricity supply, it does nothing to increase the range.  But if it is located some distance from the meter, then the question arises of how to power it?  If it plugs into a socket, what’s to stop a user unplugging it at some point?  How many household products can you think of that have remained permanently on and powered for twenty years or more?  And a device in the middle of the house transmitting at this power level is unlikely to endear itself to the electromagnetically sensitive members of the population.  Although a technical solution, it’s not practical for large scale deployment.  What the industry needs is an answer that doesn’t require the installation of extra boxes.

A much less focused piece of research is currently being undertaken by the UK government, which is looking at radio range at different frequencies for a variety of different types of house.  At least they think that’s what they’re measuring.  The actual trial is looking at carrier wave propagation, which is rather different.  Part of the rationale behind it is to provide an evidence base for their eventual choice of HAN technology.  The problem with this approach is that propagation is not the same as range.  An earlier generation of physicists, notable Friis, have already evaluated propagation and discovered that the power received at an antenna decreases with the square of increasing frequency.  Hence this piece of research will conclude that 2.4GHz, which is where ZigBee operates, has the poorest propagation of the frequencies being investigated.

It’s an outcome that doesn’t tell us anything much about range.  Although range depends on propagation, it also depends crucially on the way a wireless standard uses that frequency. Wireless standards are designed to manipulate the properties of the transmission to extend or decrease range.  They do this by employing coding gain, channel width, spread spectrum techniques, diversity, directional antennae and a host of other parameters. 

Understanding this distinction is quite difficult, so let’s take an analogy, based on your car.  A simplistic view of how fast your car could go would be based on the diameter of its wheels.  If the axle turns at a particular angular velocity, then the speed is proportional to the wheel diameter.  That’s akin to classic propagation and transmit power, where the diameter of the wheel is the equivalent of wavelength (which is inversely related to frequency) and the angular velocity of the axle turned by the engine is that of transmit power. 

But that’s not how we build cars.  In a real car we also have a gearbox, which adds a similar level of complexity to a car’s speed as a wireless standard does for range.  With the gearbox present, for the same size wheel and engine rpm, you can drive at a wide variety of speeds.  The gearbox makes appropriate compromises to maximise acceleration, torque and speed depending on which gear you select. 

Even when you’ve grasped that propagation is not the same as range and has an important dependence on range, that’s still not the whole story.  Even with the same standard, range is still highly variable dependant on different chips and pcb designs.  There’s still a lot of black magic in RF design and these can affect the range of any individual product by an order of magnitude. 

I’m not sure what the Government will deduce from this study.  It may give them an indication of what percentage of homes need another technology, but I’m not convinced, as it doesn’t bring the reality of practical implementations into the study.  What it will do is indicate that there is currently no holy grail.  The more worrying scenario is that they will try to use it to ascribe a financial cost to a delay to allow them to develop a new standard.  For example, “If 2.4GHz covers 60% of properties today, 868 MHz will cover 71% in two years time, 169 MHz would cover 83% in five years time and white space solves the problem altogether the year after I retire, how much money can be saved by sticking our collective heads in the sand and putting off smart metering?  And is it enough to pay for my index linked pension?”  Answers on a postcard to your local MP…

So what are the options for smart meter connectivity?  Today, if the UK Government chooses ZigBee, they’re probably limited to fulfilling something between half and three-quarters of UK homes.  Let’s be clear that whatever its failings, ZigBee SEP 1.1 has the security, throughput and higher layer application features in place to allow deployment to start.  Plus there are multiple vendors supporting it, both at chip and device level.   No other wireless standard can make that claim today.  It is the pragmatic choice.  Any limitation around range is not an excuse for delay.  Over the eight or more years it will take to complete the smart metering roll-out in the UK technology will evolve and should be directed towards finding solution for the remaining proportion of homes.  Hence I’d suggest that governments take a pragmatic approach.  That means accepting that no solution available today will cover 100% of home, but start with one that does, then concentrate resource on adding in other technologies to fill in the missing 25-50%.

Under that plan, stage one would be to take ZigBee and target homes where it is going to work.  There’s an interesting corollary to that.  Homes where it will work are likely to be clustered together, where all of them have the same, or very similar construction.  That means that it would make sense to start installing smart meters on a street by street basis.  What’s interesting is that’s exactly what the recent Centre for Sustainable Energy report on smart metering recommended.  Not for any reason of radio range, but because of the community advantages that occur when groups of people make changes together.  That’s just good behavioural psychology.  So let’s do that – kill two birds with one stone by starting with the streets which have houses which work with ZigBee, which will keep everyone busy for the first few years of the deployment.  Then expand the smart metering deployment to other homes as new technologies appear. 

As the utilities are doing this, the UK government should be looking at what comes next, to cover the next tranche of installations.  One option is to use Powerline communications for properties where that’s appropriate.  The Homeplug Alliance has been working with the ZigBee Alliance for several years on ensuring compatibility at an application level.  It has limitations, particularly for the mobility of In Home Displays, but it can provide a solution for another group of homes.

Slightly further out, there will be time to consider a better radio for ZigBee.  Currently ZigBee uses a radio defined by the 802.15.4 standard, in a version which was ratified back in 2003.  Although the 802.15.4 standard has evolved in the last nine years, ZigBee hasn’t incorporated any of these upgrades, as it takes considerable time and money to develop new chips.  But over the time of the smart metering deployment, it should be possible to develop a new generation of radios which could have an enhanced link budget, giving them better range.  There’s quite a good chance that they could be backwardly compatible, making life easier for consumers and equipment vendors.  That would probably provide a solution which would cope with the majority of detached, semi-detached and terraced homes, which covers a large portion of the UK housing stock.

It still leaves the issue of multi-story buildings, which are particularly resistant to short range wireless, particularly if the meter is in the basement.  However, the issue of radio propagation in these buildings isn’t one that’s limited to ZigBee and smart metering.  It’s a similar concern for mobile operators, as buildings that don’t work well for ZigBee are generally equally ill-disposed to cellular networks.  Which means it’s a problem that network operators need to solve too.  Recent research claims that over 75% of mobile calls are made from inside buildings, and around 95% of data access is also done inside.  (That last figure’s not actually that surprising, as most data access from a mobile involves looking at your phone’s screen – an activity that’s closely correlated to walking into lampposts if you’re outside the home.)

A lot of research is going into solving this problem, notably by covering these buildings with distributed systems, capable of RF distribution over Ethernet or structured cabling.  This allows RF signals over the 500MHz – 5GHz range to be distributed throughout the entirety of the building.  Today most of these projects are in the research stage, although companies like Zinwave are beginning to turn them into real products.  But with investment and commitment, they should appear as viable commercial solutions in the next five years.  The beauty of this approach is that it would work with the current generation of ZigBee products, and it might even get paid for by the network operators.

The important thing is that we don’t wait until there is a perfect solution that covers 100% of homes.  If we do, we’ll never get there, as there will be no income for the industry to evolve new solutions.  Instead we need to be pragmatic.  Understand the limitations and start with what we can do.  And then use the experience and revenue from that to extend to new solutions.  There are already roadmaps and research which promise tenable answers, but they need the momentum of deployment to bring them to reality.  By working with mobile networks to solve shared problems the industry can probably move much faster.  Just look at the developments in mobile infrastructure over the last decade.  It shows what can be done when the commercial incentive is there.

Most importantly, don’t give in to the inherent risk aversion of the energy industry.  They are facing a massive step change in their level of technology and IT systems by signing up to meet the UK smart metering mandate.  Because of its degree of deregulation, the UK deployment will be one of the most complex systems in the world.  The utilities are starting to realise that and some would not be averse to applying the brakes to wait for the perfect solution.  Particularly if they believe that might be a long way away.

But it should all be possible.  If we’re pragmatic and work together, the UK will gain some world beating expertise.  Technology will get there.  Eight years ago (the equivalent of how long we are planning to take to complete the UK roll-out), ZigBee was little more than a pipe dream.  Wi-Fi didn’t exist, nor did the iPhone or the Pad.  Technology can move faster than we realise, particularly when it has something driving it.  In this case that’s a well-defined problem, with the added incentive of deploying tens of millions of real products. 

The UK has taken an aggressive stance in defining and mandating the world’s most complex smart metering system.  It should show its resolve in moving forward by taking the risk and stepping up to develop the appropriate new technologies alongside that deployment.  If it does, then UK plc will gain valuable expertise in demonstrating and selling smart metering to the rest of the world.

Instead of the obvious call for more, I’d like to look back at the many advantages of cables.  As designers rush into wireless, it’s easy to forget what they’re giving up.  Wireless offers new opportunities, but only at the expense of many serious compromises.  In this brave new world of wireless it’s apparent that some people are forgetting those compromises.  In this and the following article I’m going to look at what they are and then address the misconception that wireless standards can be treated in the same way as wired ones, debunking the common misconception that they follow the OSI model.

Once you sign up to the wireless dream, it’s very easy to forget just how good cables are.  Unless you’re pushing through extremely high frequencies (in the range that we’d generally consider to be wireless), or very high throughputs, then cabled range within the home isn’t a problem.  If you want a cable to go farther you just buy another reel of cable.  And for most of the time, throughput’s not much of a problem either.  Compared to wireless standards, cables are fast.  They support throughputs in hundreds of Megabits and Gigabits per second where most wireless standards struggle to get over a few hundred kilobits.

One of the big differences from cables, which many would say is a key advantage of wireless is topology.   This is where wireless becomes non-intuitive, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  Topology with cables is easy.  You get the end of the cable, find a mating plug or socket and plug it in.  Instant connectivity – it works.  With wireless you have nothing physical to hold or plug into.  Wireless is cunningly invisible.  To connect it, both ends (and it can be more than two, which is even more complicated) need to start talking to each other.  It’s that dreaded term “pairing”, which is where a large percentage of wireless products fail at the first hurdle.  It also brings us to the next difference – security.

Security is something that you don’t need to bother about with most cables, because the act of plugging them in gives you physical security.  The data that you send stays within the cable and no-one else can access it.  Devotees of spy fiction will point out that you can break in and attach covert listening devices, or even use sensitive radio receivers to listen in to the weak electromagnetic field generated by the data flowing along your cable.  They’re right, but it’s not likely that your neighbour or the local kids will be capable of doing that.  And if they are you’ve probably got more important things to worry about.

With wireless you potentially lose all of that security.  The data you’re sending from your laptop to your router, or your smart meter to your display can be captured by anyone else within range.  (Unlike cables which are strictly point to point, wireless is generally omni-directional.)  That raises two problems – stopping other products masquerading as legitimate device on your network which might send spurious commands, and adds a requirement to encrypt your data, so that if someone else captures some of your transmissions, they can’t decode them.

There is a whole science built up around wireless security, composed of experts who write security algorithms and experts who try to crack them, both for genuine and nefarious reasons.  That’s led to something of a security arms race, where to remain secure ever more complex algorithms and authentication schemes are being developed, which require ever more powerful microprocessors to be built into wireless chips.  These are there just to maintain the security of the cable-replacement link.  Other security, such as the https security the internet uses for credit card purchases has to run on top of these, whether the underlying link is a cable or wireless.

The ever more powerful processors needed to support complex security algorithms bring us to another point of difference – power consumption.  It’s a fallacy to say that cables don’t need power – they have an inherent resistance which needs power to send bits of information, although in most cases it’s very low compared to wireless.  As you send more data, you need to put in processing effort to shape the pulses going down the cable; you also need to terminate the cable to make it behave more like a waveguide, which again needs power.  But you don’t have the overhead of processing for security, nor the fact that wireless is generally transmitting in all directions, even though it’s only receiving in one.  (And anyone who says that MIMO is power efficient has been reading and believing too many marketing manuals.)

Then there’s latency.  It’s an eternal surprise to engineers starting to work with wireless that when you put data into one end of a link it doesn’t immediately pop out of the other.  The IP community is already familiar with the problem, but the magnitude of potential delay can be totally unexpected.  Try listening to a film over a Bluetooth stereo headset to discover what lipsynch is all about.  Latency can often be measured in seconds.

Even when you’ve got your wireless system to work there’s the annoying problem of robustness, which comes down to available spectrum and interference.  That’s not to say that cables can’t suffer from interference.  A well place nuclear explosion can create a very disruptive electromagnetic pulse over a short period, but it’s not something you come across on a daily basis in most domestic environments.  In contrast different wireless standards that share the same limited spectrum get in each other’s way.  Ten years ago, when I first installed Wi-Fi, or 802.11b as it was called then, it worked really well throughout the house and garden.  As all of my neighbours installed it, along with baby monitors and TV sender, the performance degraded to the point where it became worse than useless.  As a result I’ve just wired my house with CAT-5 for Internet access.  It’s a worrying by realistic fact that any in-home wireless system will probably work best on the day you install it, and then get progressively worse as all of your neighbours get one too.

Those are the big physical differences, but there’s a whole host of less tangible ones to consider.  Differences that just don’t exist in the world of cables.  Let’s start with interoperability.  In the cable world that’s mostly down to different plugs and sockets.  Of course there’s fine detail like multiway and coaxial cables and the level of screening, but in most cases you can solder a different connector on and it works.  In contrast there’s absolutely no interoperability between different wireless standards.  Quite often there’s precious little backwards compatibility between the different versions of a single wireless standard.  From a consumer viewpoint that means the product you buy today probably won’t work with the one you bought a few years ago.  With cables there’s pretty good compatibility – at most you need to change the plug or buy an adapter to get several decades of backwards compatibility.  In contrast wireless generally means a complete replacement.  Nice work when you can get it, but not something that endears you to the user.

So why the enthusiasm for wireless?  Mostly because of the Holy Grail of simplicity that it purports to offer.  Simplicity of installation (no wires or holes in walls), simplicity of commissioning (no need to connect cables to inaccessible sockets), simplicity of mobility (you can carry devices around and connect to different things in difference places).  But it’s really difficult getting all of that to work.

To put back the basics of a cable – throughput, range, security, latency ease of connection, all of the things I’ve talked about above, is an immensely difficult task.  You can specify most cables on a single sheet of paper.  In comparison most wireless standards require several thousand pages of technical specification.  And even then each standard is a compromise, making its individual choice of what is important for a specific application.  Each one takes hundreds of man years of effort to write, test and turn into reality. 

Which adds another complication.  To make this complexity work requires some highly talented companies and individuals.  All of them contribute their ideas and patents into a standard.  Which means that all wireless standards involve some form of IP license or certification requirement.  That means you either need to pay money to join the standards group if you want to use it in your products, pay someone a license fee, or pay a test house to certify it before you’re allowed to ship it.  After which you may discover you’re not allowed to export it, as some of the high tech aspects, particularly around security are subject to export restrictions.  Bear in mind that I’m not talking about exotic industrial or military standards here, but everyday consumer standards for products you’d use in the home.  In contrast, anyone can make and ship a cable.

But that Holy Grail of wireless connectivity is strong.  However difficult it may be compared with the simple cable it paints a wonderfully desirable future free of tangles, along with the promise of a new generation of product design where products are no longer islands, but can communicate with each other in that vision of the Internet of Things.

But it’s important to understand the compromises underlying wireless.  To paraphrase the psalm, “and now abide range, throughput, security, these three; but the greatest of these is security”.  Well developed, robust wireless standards are neccessary, because without them we can’t attempt to fulfil these requirements.  And if any one of these three fail, so will customer confidence.  In conclusion, I’m hoping for another year of growth in wireless.   But it’s as well to understand the shifting sands we stand on when we make that wish.

In an equally serendipitous coincidence, Position 70 in the same survey goes to Innocent.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

This bizarre situation arises from the decision back in March this year, when PG&E worked out what to do with their electro-sensitive customers who were demanding that they weren’t radiated with emissions emanating from their smart meters.  PG&E put forward a proposal to make customers pay for non-smart meters, charging somewhere between $135 and $270 a year for the privilege of having a good old-fashioned meter reader come round and leave them a note to say they were out when he called.  The double whammy benefit that none of the media appeared to pick up is that the $270 charge would eat into these user’s mobile phone bill, so they’d have less money to spend on getting radiated by phoning their local papers to campaign against smart meters.  More affluent customers could have the gold plated option of paying several thousand dollars to have their meters moved to the top of local telegraph poles, or buried underground.

PG&E reckoned that this option would be taken up by 185,400 customers.  (I don’t know how they got to that precise figure. Although by a strange coincidence, 1854 is the year that Texas was connected by telegraph to the rest of the US, putting in place the telecoms network that Enron would use so effectively 150 years later.)  Anyway, this number presented PG&E with a problem.  185,400 is not a lot in terms of commissioning a special non-wireless meter.  So they were faced with the prospect of having to pay more for a non-smart meter, wiping out a substantial part of that $50 million annual windfall from their more sensitive customers.  Today they announced a solution – they’d supply the same wireless smart meter, but turn the radio off.  Enter the wirelessless meter.

Over the past few years there have been a number of rumours about smart meters being shipped with the radio disconnected.  That was because they’d been specified to include a radio, but no-one had ever intended to connect it, because it was way before the standards had been completed and it would probably not have worked.  But because it was on the procurement tick-list, the chips were fitted, but never turned on.  I’m not sure whether these stories are apocryphal – they covered several different wireless standards and allegedly several million meters, but PG&E’s decision means that they’re going to be true in the future.

For the different standards and chip companies supporting them, this opens up a fascinating new market opportunity.  Instead of competing to claim they have the best implementation of the standard, they now have the chance to compete on the basis that they are less effective than any other standard.  It doesn’t matter what your range is (unless it’s zero, which is now very good), what profiles you support, or even how power efficient you are.  All that matters is that you can keep quiet.  It does raise the interesting question of whether you need to go through a radio certification for a device that will never turn on, but I’m sure that the test houses will claim you do.  After all, they’ve got a living to make as well.

What we don’t know is whether these chips will be turned off in such a way that they can be turned back on.  So if a house is sold, can the new radio be turned back on.  And if so, how can it be done?  And I’m sure our PG&E’s wireless-shy community will want to know that it can’t happen accidentally and fry them in their sleep.

One important thing PG&E haven’t told us is whether these radios will need to be upgradable to support a future IPv6 based network which also doesn’t transmit.  I’m sure NIST will have a view on that, so maybe we can expect a new PAP group to consider disconnected radios.

You can’t really blame PG&E for opening up an Alice in Wonderland debate on dumb smart meters.  They’re trying to find a pragmatic solution in the face of wireless deniers.  But it does highlight the ever increasing complexity of the hoops that the smart metering industry is having to jump through.  All of which sucks up effort from the more important task of making the roll-out effective.

Is that a white rabbit I just saw jump out of my meter?

There’s no doubt that ZigBee is well placed in current smart meter deployments.  Although there are quite a limited number of real ZigBee deployments in Europe, the UK has more or less committed to SEP 1.2 for its foundation phase of national deployment and most meter and IHD suppliers were showing ZigBee products, albeit with not very many sporting a ZigBee certified logo.

Despite that, a significant number of suppliers were also highlighting support for the new Wireless M-Bus standard, which has slithered down the spectrum to its new resting point of 169 MHz.  Wireless M-Bus has always had a popular following within Germany, with an implementation based on a radio running at 868 MHz.  The shift to the lower frequency acknowledges one of the enduring complaints which the 868MHz camp has levelled at 2.4GHz solutions, which is their potentially limited range. 

Whilst 2.4GHz is a frequency that’s fine for most houses, it faces challenges with blocks of flats.  Up until now, the 868 MHz triumvirate of Wireless M-Bus, Z-Wave and wireless KNX had always given the impression that they could achieve adequate range at 868 MHz.  This break in the 868 MHz ranks does not augur well for a reasoned debate, but just increases the in-fighting and paranoia about whether any radio standard works or is ready for deployment.  That’s not what Smart Metering needs. 

Lower frequency proponents have a history of playing mischief on the 2.4GHz standards, citing their better range.  Whilst that’s technically true, it can be a specious argument.  Moving away from 2.4GHz brings other problems, not least of which is the lack of bandwidth in the lower ISM bands.  That limits the throughput which can be achieved by operating at a lower frequency.  It may not be a major issue for transmitting measurement data, but it means that features like Over the Air upgrades may be challenging.

The PR around these lower frequencies solutions generally focuses on the range of the radio, but that’s only part of what you need for a smart meter or smart home deployment.  The bigger development task is the protocol stack which brings security, power management, topology and commissioning tools to the solution.  A lot of the lower frequency standards jostling for position have relatively simple stacks.  In one sense, that’s good, as there’s nothing wrong with simplicity.  But for an application like smart metering, where security and integrity of data are paramount, these simplistic approaches look rather limiting.  The industry needs to understand that the time for talking and pontification is over.  We’re only really going to discover what works by committing to deployments, rather than pandering to academics and consultants who want to be paid for telling us there’s something better around the corner.

Wireless M-Bus was not the only contender.  The main Smart Metering show had outgrown its space and spawned a daughter exhibition and conference targeting the Smart Home.  On the exhibition floor for Smart Homes, there seemed to more floor space taken up by wireless standards that there was devoted to products.  Z-Wave were proudly demonstrating the range of products that they’ve enabled, as was EnOcean. Wireless DECT, a recent latecomer to the table were busy promoting themselves, as were wirelessKNX – another favourite in Germany.  In comparison, the ZigBee booth looked rather small and apologetic.

Around the show floor, there was the initial evidence that ZigBee may have let in a Trojan Horse by embracing IP in their Smart Energy Profile 2.0.  I’ve written about the incompatibility of IP with low power radio before and my personal view is still that it’s a really bad idea.  But the IP lobby has gained momentum, especially since the decision to allow it to run on different radios.  That was evident in Amsterdam.  SEP 2.0 is still a long way off, but I came across four separate stands with demonstrations of an early implementation.  What was interesting is that only one of these four ran on a ZigBee radio – the demo being given by Ember.  The other three were all using Wi-Fi.  And as far as I could tell, these were all using stacks from different vendors, running on different host microprocessors.  So a lot of effort is being put into SEP 2.0 by people who have no interest in ZigBee.  It’s quite clear that the Wi-Fi community see this as their chance to wrest smart metering and home automation away from ZigBee.

For those with a long memory, ZigBee isn’t the first wireless standard to get mugged by the IP fundamentalists.  Back in 2002, when Microsoft was starting to court Bluetooth, it led a similar crusade to incorporate IP support into the Bluetooth standard.  At conference after conference they would present the world according to IPv6, to the extent that it became a favourite game for delegates to lay bets on how many seconds it would be before the Microsoft speaker uttered those four syllables.  The IP lobby got sufficient traction for many man years of development work to be undertaken, some might say wasted, leading to the PAN profile, the BNEP Network Encapsulation Protocol and an Automation profile proposal using BNEP to support ANSI 1451.5.  All of which have subsequently been ignored by product and application designers.  The only significant think to come out of this IP invasion was that its major proponent became the Chairman of the Bluetooth SIG.  So maybe there’s a lesson for Bob Heile (Chair of the ZigBee Alliance) to keep a close look out for Geeks bearing IP gifts.

To some degree, it doesn’t matter too much which standard is chosen for any national or regional smart metering deployment.  Utilities have always tended to purchase proprietary versions of meters and back ends – a fact that has led to the observation that US utilities may be wasting over $2 billion is their procurement policies.  So if the UK goes ZigBee 1.2, Germany goes wireless M-Bus, France goes Powerline and Massachusetts goes Wi-Fi SEP 2.0, that will work for utilities.  What it does not do is open up a market for connected home automation devices.  The point here is that whereas utilities determine exactly what they put in your home, when it comes to appliances, it’s the consumer that chooses.  Which makes it is really important for the industry to coalesce on one single radio standard.  And I emphasise radio, as it’s the physical layer that is important here.  Wireless standards are complex, which means they are both difficult and expensive to implement.  They’re also difficult for consumers to commission.  Most appliance manufacturers are not familiar with them and don’t want to have to support multiple options for different markets. 

Today you can buy some top of the range domestic appliances with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or Z-Wave, but they’re expensive prosumer products for the geeks.  A lot of the speakers in the smart home conference were promoting a vision where you can lounge in front of your TV and use your smartphone or tablet to turn off the annoying bleep on your dishwasher.  (In case you hadn’t guessed, the utilities are starting to recruit marketing managers from the telecoms industry.)  Whether or not you believe in that vision, it’s only going to start to become a reality when the industry decides on a wireless standard that spans phones, TVs and dishwashers.  There is a school of thought which believes that we’ll buy gateways that will translate between all of the different wireless protocols.  I don’t buy that one.  I’ve heard it before, as a solution to bridge between different combinations of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, DECT, Insteon, X-10 and IrDA.  These gateways exist, but they’re expensive and complex to use.   I see nothing that will change that.

What the industry needs is a single standard to coalesce around.  That will drive volume, which will reduce price, which will increase its penetration from high end to standard appliances.  There’s lots of individual alliances and demonstrations going on, but they’re still at the stage of teenage groping, not meaningful, long-term relationships.  It doesn’t help that Government sponsored bodies, such as NIST and the EU are trying to impose their own agendas, like prudish parents who are attempting to enforce an arranged marriage.

Today the assumption is that home automation will follow the lead of smart meter deployments, as these will be the primary source of consumption data.  However, that may not be a valid assumption.  The utility industry has its own, peculiarly slow deployment timescales and a risk aversion that means it will probably fight to retain control of data.  Each utility or national Government may well mandate their own choice of wireless standard.  But by the time it’s deployed, the consumer industry may have gone down a different route.  Nest Labs has just launched its Wi-Fi thermostat.  It’s not the first, but the company’s founders have learnt lessons from their time at Apple about how to make a product desirable.  It’s certainly going to raise the barrier for home HVAC products.

But back to Amsterdam.  One of the most bizarre aspects was the closing session of the Smart Homes conference, which saw a panel session that crammed the stage with representatives of most of the competing standards.  The ZigBee Alliance was there, along with HomePlug Power Alliance, the KNX Association, Ultra Low Energy DECT, the OSGI Alliance, EnOcean, the Home Gateway Initiative and Z-Wave.  All was sweetness and light as they agreed that there was room for all of them to work together.  But you got the distinct feeling that you were looking at animals at the Zoo who were waiting for night to fall, each in the knowledge that their keepers had forgotten to lock the cages.  And each of them knew that as soon as the lights went out, one or more of them would be on the menu.

Neither are immediately obvious candidates, which is what makes this interesting.  But taking a deeper look their appointment could highlight some interesting changes in where Bluetooth is going.

For those who don’t know how they’re structured, most industry standards groups, (as opposed to Standards Development Organisations or SDOs, which we’ll get to in a minute), consist of a Board of Directors whose role it is to guide the development, marketing and certification of the standard.  In the early days, these were normally companies with a vested interest in using the standard.  As the standard matures, these companies tend to drift away, to be replaced with chip manufacturers who want to evolve the standard to keep competitors out of the market.  In most cases, these industry groups tend to get things done faster, as they limit who can take part in writing the standards, generally to companies with a vested interest who are prepared to pay for the privilege. 

In contrast SDOs tend to be more open, allowing academic institutions to participate.  That often means they’re favoured by governments, who fund academic institutions to get involved and don’t necessarily care when the work is completed.  It’s the old case of too many cooks.  So SIGs and their Boards have a lot going for them.

Bluetooth largely set the standard for how to constitute a SIG (if you’ll pardon the pun), with a founding set of five members – Toshiba, IBM, Ericsson, Nokia and Intel back in 1998.    “What, no Microsoft?”, I hear you say, as did most of the rest of the industry.  For eighteen months every US journalist rubbished Bluetooth for this omission, until in December of 1999 the board was extended to include Microsoft, along with Motorola and the dearly departed 3Com and Agere.  That didn’t stop the media claiming Bluetooth was dead.  However, like Mark Twain, reports of its death were somewhat exaggerated, as proven by fact it ships a couple of billion chips every year.

The Bluetooth SIG has hitherto carried out a rather Stalinist policy towards board membership, trying to insist that it never changes and that any company who is on the Board has always been on the Board.  And despite some attrition over the years, it has kept the board very much the same.  That contrasts with other similar organisations, which have been more ready to shuffles the directorial cards.  Even when conspiracy theorists suggested that Steve Jobs might join back in 2002, the Bluetooth Board kept a wary distance and declined to act.

Which makes the current announcement all the more interesting.  It’s been a difficult few years for standards organisations.  As the recession has taken hold, large organisations, who traditionally provide the board members for these standards organisations have tightened their belts and withdrew their support, leaving the daily work to their stack and chip suppliers.  The Bluetooth board has held remarkably firm against this trend, although it has a set of crown jewels in terms of its IP ownership, which other standards bodies can only look at envy.  Access to that has been an important factor behind the stability that the Bluetooth Board has experienced over the years.  But despite that, they’ve no opened the doors, albeit with an interesting disclaimer that the appointments are only for an initial period of two years.  The cynical might say that gives them just long enough to get disillusioned, but not long enough to effect any change.

Why the change?  Both appointments suggest an intent to push the new Bluetooth low energy standard.  Nordic Semiconductor were one of the pioneers of Bluetooth low energy back in the days when it was still called Wibree.  Getting a Board seat ahead of the more established chip vendors such as Broadcom, CSR, Qualcomm and TI is a real coup and as clear an indication as you can get that Bluetooth low energy is about to get the attention it deserves.

Apple is more interesting.  It’s almost ten years since those early rumours that it should be on the board, during which it’s been responsible for some excellent Bluetooth implementations (on the Macs) and some abysmal one on the iPhone, where it’s authentication chip has turned a standard into a proprietary walled garden.  Despite their superb product design and marketing, they’re a relative newcomer to the standards community, generally relying on external standards rather than sharing their expertise to create new, open ones.

Again, the clue for their appointment is in Bluetooth low energy and what it offers.  A key market for low energy has always been personal health and fitness devices.  The new MacBook Air and Mac mini appear to be planning to make full use of these, as reported in the latest releases on the Bluetooth website.  Let’s hope that these don’t try to cripple the standard with more proprietary extensions or authentication.  The market needs Bluetooth low energy to be open and interoperable.

The one remaining question is “why stop at two new members”?  There’s still the invisible gorilla in the short range space, which is Google.  Their announcements of Android@Home during their I/O conference suggested that they could be the ideal partner for Bluetooth low energy, as they could bring their API expertise to the top of the low energy stack.  Of course, they still can.  And it will be interesting to see whether Apple’s high level API for developers will emerge as an open standard for the Bluetooth low energy community?  Low energy developers need a single API, not a proliferation of them.

The other interesting question is what this means for other standards?  Whilst Bluetooth low energy has been slowly emerging from its cocoon, other pretenders have been making hay.  Notably ANT+, which has attracted a growing following in the health and fitness arena.  Most of these products use a Nordic chip (recently augmented by silicon from TI), but with Nordic on the Bluetooth board, and Apple hopefully providing the powerhouse for independent product developers, does this appointment close the door for ANT and start a steady attrition of their existing supporters?

The race is on and only time will tell.  This is a major step for the Bluetooth board to take and could have ramifications far greater than initially considered.  One that hasn’t been mentioned is where the SIG goes in terms of location.  The appointment of Microsoft to the Board back in 1999 signalled the start of an inexorable transition of the Bluetooth headquarters from Kansas City to Seattle.  I wonder whether the addition of Apple might provoke a similar relocation in a few years’ time to Cupertino?

Wherever the SIG may land, let’s hope that the road forward for Bluetooth low energy is now clear.  It’s difficult to think of a better starting pistol.  All we need now is to get enough runners on the track and make sure they’re all facing in the same direction.