June 2015 – Creative Connectivity

Why LTE should wait for 2.3GHz

In the last blog I wrote about the immense damage that could be done to the market for connected personal devices and the Internet of Things by licensing the 2.3GHz spectrum to mobile networks. As OFCOM is still asking for consultation responses prior to their auction I thought it timely to list some of the reasons that I believe justify a delay in releasing this spectrum. If you agree that it should be postponed, you have until June 26^th to send OFCOM your views. Please do, as I believe this could cost the industry billions of pounds and push back innovation.

The battle is between mobile network operators, who want more spectrum and the ongoing survival of the 2.4GHz band. The 2.4GHz spectrum is unlicensed, and used by the wireless standards in most consumer devices, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee and others. If mobile phones start to use frequencies close to 2.4GHz, it will degrade the performance of these products. Your Internet access may slow down, audio bars and Sonos systems may get noisy, hearing aids will perform poorly, the response of smart home systems could get sluggish or stop. Everything that uses the 2.4GHz band may work less well and have a reduced range, to the point where they’re no longer compelling devices. If that happens, users will stop buying products, businesses may close, investors will lose their money and the current Internet of Things bubble will be firmly burst.

There are a lot of “mays” in that. That’s because we can’t be sure. To their credit, OFCOM have commissioned some tests which show that there is a problem, but they didn’t test enough, or new enough products to determine the true extent of the problem. OFCOM’s response is to say that manufacturers need to redesign their products to be more resistant to interference. However, that adds cost, the technology is not yet available for small products and it can’t be retrofitted to the billions of existing products already on the market. For that reason I believe any auction should be delayed to give the industry time to test and see if it can develop solutions. Otherwise the costs could be enormous.

FCC and OFCOM plans threaten the Internet of Things

If you’ve invested in any Internet of Things companies or bought a smart thermostat or Apple watch you may live to regret it. Current plans by the people who regulate the radio spectrum – OFCOM in the UK and the FCC in the US have plans in place which may stop most of these devices working. As a result they could cost investors and the industry hundreds of trillions of dollars.

To most people this is a very obscure technical subject, but I’d urge you to read on. The problem is that the debate is being conducted by regulatory specialists, who appear to have little idea of the damage they may be doing. The consequences are not percolating up to CEOs and investors, who should be screaming blue murder. The result of that resounding silence could be that any products that use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Thread or any other radio that works at 2.4GHz will degrade or stop working. That includes your home internet, smart watches, fitness trackers, hearing aids, smart meters, health monitors, wireless headsets; in fact most of the products which collectively are beginning the make up the Internet of Things. It will be a self-imposed wound which could put the industry back ten years, allowing China and others to leapfrog to a position of technical leadership.

I come to praise Arduino

If you know your Julius Caesar, you may guess where this is going. Arduinos can seriously damage your start-up and your investors. But before we talk about that let me start by saying that I love Arduinos. I use them around the house in all sort of projects; they water my strawberries, and automate all sorts of things which most people wouldn’t ever think need automating. I’ve recently been inspired by Kurt Grandis’ project using video recognition and a water gun to track and deter squirrels – I’ve plans to use that as the basis of a robot to stop the local wildlife stealing our figs and apricots. Without Arduinos I’d never embark on some of the projects that eat up my free time.

I also love the innovation they enable. They underpin much of electronics design within the Maker community, letting makers accomplish projects that they would never have dreamt of starting without the benefit of the breadth of shared expertise which the community generates. The innovation of these developers has reenergised a love for making things for the sheer sake of it – because they can be made. For those of us who grew up with tinkering, frequenting the Tandys and Henry’s of this world, the Arduino and Raspberry Pi have brought back and re-energised a hobbyist love of design which most of my engineering generation thought had permanently died with the advent of mass market consumer electronics.

Not only that, they’ve helped the growth of crowdfunded hardware projects. Over the past few years Indiegogo and Kickstarter have blossomed, with all kinds of innovative concepts raising hundreds of millions of dollars of support from funders. Many of the prototypes for these developments only happened because they were based on Arduinos. And the process is self-fulfilling, as projects such as the RFduino, Qduino, Neutrino, Microduino, Piccolino, Attoduino, BLEduino, Garagino, Superduino, Tinyduino and others have developed ever more specialised variants to feed future generations of products.