WiFi: The Elephant

To all companies betting on WiFi for their IoT product and services strategy: I have a warning for you. Reconsider your radio. WiFi ain't gonna fly for you.

Last week I attended the AllSeen Alliance Summit in Seattle. I'm pretty new to AllJoyn and still on a steep learning curve. The framework itself is very interesting and promising but it's heavy reliance on WiFi worries me a lot.

There are many myths about WiFi and many known issues that nobody wants to talk about.

E.g. I'm rearing from a keynote speaker AllJoyn is peer to peer and does not require a hub. Huh? So suddenly WiFi does not require an access point and devices will talk to each other? C'mon... don't lie!

Then I attend a number of sessions diving deep into products and solutions. And no single demo works. Because "the environment in the hotel is too noisy". And instead of live demos we have playback slides. Aha. So do we expect the conditions to improve? Will we have less connected devices next year? And even less in 2020?

It seems like the industry has been blinded by the initial "success" of WiFi products. While adding a single smart lamp to home WiFi will not overload the router, adding 100 devices certainly will. And Gartner says we will have 500 on average.

Also everybody talks about energy savings. Take a 5W bulb as an example. Say it is on for 4 hours a day, so it will consume 20Wh worth of energy a day. Assuming 95% efficiency of the power supply the same 5W bulb that is "smart" (read: powered on all the time) will waste 1Wh for power supply standby plus 7Wh to keep the WiFi receiver active. The same figure for a Bluetooth Smart radio is 0.35Wh. Yes. 20 times less. Are consumers aware of the fact a WiFi smart bulb wastes 40% energy every day? Manufacturers certainly are.

And then is the huge security issue. AllJoyn has just released the Security 2.0 Framework. Great. But do they live in another world? Don't the WiFi devices require first connecting to a WiFi network? I had written tons on the poor UX experience of that before. But then when you decide to change your router (changing the Internet provider or just because the old one got unstable after you added 10th bulb to the system), how are you going to propagate the password change to all your devices that suddenly stopped working? Setup the house from scratch?

WiFi is the elephant in the IoT room. I believe many are aware of the problems, but no one wants to talk about it. So here is my voice and do consider it a serious warning. Don't bet on WiFi on your connected product strategy. It ain't gonna fly. And customers will hate you.

P.S. On more in-depth analysis on why WiFi is not the right solution for smart things, please see our Silvair blog at https://blog.silvair.com/.