Creative Connectivity

Smart Home Standards go wild at Amsterdam

The Smart Metering and Smart Homes exhibition in Amsterdam is Europe’s largest show for this industry, so it’s a good reflection of where things are at. Given the amount of noise that’s been generated around ZigBee and its Smart Energy Profile, I’d expected to see most of the other wireless contenders to be absent or skulking in their cages. However, someone walking around without those preconceptions might have gone home with a rather different view of the state of play.

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.

Dead ANT? Apple and Nordic join the Bluetooth board.

One of the more interesting recent announcements in the wireless space has been the appointment of two new companies to the Board of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) – Apple and Nordic Semiconductor.

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.

Korea Inc overtakes Nokia as Global Phone Supplier

Back in 1996 I was part of a small startup – Grey Cell Systems – which against all odds won a contract to write a PC based, GSM data stack for Samsung’s first mobile phone. A few weeks after we got the contract we were invited to a meeting at Samsung’s research centre near London, where the phone was being designed. A senior manager had come over from Korea to tell us Samsung’s vision. I could see all of the listening engineers trying to suppress as grin as his translator told the assembled audience that Samsung’s strategy was to become number one in mobile phones by 2001. At the time Samsung didn’t even have a phone – that would take at least three attempts and several years and none of us in that meeting could believe their optimism. They didn’t reach that goal. They still haven’t, but they’re not far off. And since 2003, they’ve been the only company Nokia has admitted to being scared of.

Samsung have made it to number one in Europe: in the first quarter of this year, shipping 13.2 million units – 600,000 ahead of Nokia. But for the last few years I’ve been tracking a slightly different metric – the combined sales of Samsung and LG, which I’ve called Korea Inc. They’ve been closing the gap and in the latest figures from IDC we can see that they can now claim supremacy, pushing Nokia firmly into second place.

Energy Addiction – Changing Consumer Behaviour

Every so often you hear something that seems fairly trivial at the time, but then, as you think about it, you realise that it contains a fundamental truth. That happened to me a few weeks ago when I was speaking at the Smart Metering UK conference in London.

One of the speakers before me was Aidan O’Neill of PrePayPower in Ireland. Aidan made a statement that the bulk of his customers spend more each day on cigarettes than they do on electricity. It’s one of those throw-away lines that doesn’t really impinge at the time. Let me explain why it’s so important.

Will Google kill ZigBee?

Or will it main Bluetooth? Or Wi-Fi? Or maybe Z-Wave? Or any of the multitude of other short range wireless standards. It’s a question that was raised last week when Google did a keynote presentation on Android@Home at their I/O Conference where they announced a wireless light bulb which could be turned on and off from a mobile phone. The technical details are very sketchy – much of it coming from Lighting Sciences Group, who did the accompanying demonstration. It’s unclear whether it’s a new radio, a new protocol, a new standard or even what frequency it’s running at. But you don’t expect the absence of little details like that to stop speculation.

The greatest level of speculation has come from the smart energy industry, who are suggesting that ZigBee could be the main casualty. Jesse Best at Smart Grid News asks whether this will take away ZigBee’s momentum. And there’s an interesting range of comments about that on his site about that, which are worth reading. Throughout the industry, Google’s announcement is making people question whether they’ve made the right choice?

I’m not sure that anything Google does will displace ZigBee from its place in smart meters. That’s actually quite a closed market, as most utilities don’t really want to share that data with consumer devices. Where it is a threat is in home automation. Home Automation is still a very nascent market and Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ZigBee are all pitching to own it. The reason I think they are at risk is because of what Google can bring, which is an API (Application Programming Interface). Google has succeeded in areas like mapping because it makes it easy for developers to access and mash up data. In contrast, wireless standards shy away from making their stacks easy to use, particularly for embedded designs. If Google can make it easy, thousands of garage and backroom developers will take it and innovate with it, and the existing standards may all find themselves left behind.

Smart Energy Profile 2.0 – a case of too much PAP?

Just when you though Smart Energy was settling down, and it was going to be smart meters all round, the smart grid movement is getting its knickers in a twist. It’s not a problem about what needs to be done, but about the standards, what goes into the standards and who is responsible for them? In the past few weeks both NIST and the ZigBee Alliance have had some major tantrums, which raises questions about the speed and degree of technology push that is being forced on the industry.

There is no lack of agreement about the need to improve the grid and the way that we consume energy. Growing demand, political concern over the stability of supplies, climate change worries, new challenges in the form of electric vehicles and decades of underinvestment in generating capacity and the grid have persuaded Governments around the world to support and mandate investment in new “smart” technology from smart meters in homes to intelligence in the grid. The last time the world saw a similar level of stimulus was in the 1930s, during the great depression. So this really is likely to be a once in a lifetime event. The political will is there, the question is who decides how it is going to be done? Groups like NIST in the US are pushing hard to put things in place, but are groups like this too academic in their approach? Over the last year they’ve set up eighteen Priority Action Plans or PAPs to oversee development. (A potentially unfortunate acronym as my dictionary defines pap as “worthless or oversimplified ideas”). And according to a recent pronouncement they obviously don’t think the industry is doing enough to meet the challenge. But before we look at that, let me share a quote with you:

“I hate those guys. I hate those legislators and politicians – not because they restrict business and screw up the markets, even though they do and it does. I hate governments because I know those guys. I went to school with them. And let me tell you, the weakest, most ignorant, most drunken incompetents work for the US government. And the bottom of the barrel, know-nothing dicks design the regulations for a market they know nothing about. Why should we look at the regulations they’ve put in place by committee and go “Yeah, you suck at your jobs, fine, we’ll ignore that and suck at ours too?”

Not my words, but those of Lucy Prebble from her brilliant play “Enron“. It’s a diatribe that she gives to Jeffrey Skilling – Enron’s President, as his empire starts to crumble. Strangely, from a character that has little to commend himself throughout the rest of the play, it’s a dramatic moment where you suddenly start to feel sympathy with him, particularly if you’ve ever worked in a regulated industry. Of course, that speech is just fiction and has nothing to do with the current situation…