Snowflake

Silvair is running a series of blog posts discussing pros and cons of various communication protocols for the IoT/Smart/Connected World. Some of them are fresh and growing and some are more mature (to put it mildly). We've been playing on this field for many years and our ultimate answer is:

Hybrid / Snowflake

The main misconception we see is the organizations try to push their solutions to cover everything end-to-end. It is like a taxi company would try to persuade you they could drive you across the ocean. While taxi is just best for the leg to local airport. And then a propeller plane to an international hub and then transatlantic jet. Nobody flies their kids to school in jets and nobody crosses oceans by cars.

But as I speak to all those wireless standard bodies, I see they want to be solution s for everything. WiFi wants to connect light bulbs and Bluetooth wants to provide Internet access. Even the best low power mesh network will saturate when forced to carry the aggregated traffic of all nodes over a single link. Similarly a high throughput backbone technology will drain batteries as quick as a jet engine burns through a car tank's worth of fuel.

The physical world is hybrid and so is the IoT world. What becomes really important are the hubs and gateways that interconnect the technologies. How many transports can they connect to. And how accessible the connections are.