Why Today's IoT Cannot Scale

IoT developers have struggled to achieve widespread product adoption because they have been forced to build with the same fundamentally limited technology toolkits.

 

Those underlying electronics are plagued by a continued reliance on batteries and inadequate wireless communication options—both of which have stopped countless IoT products dead in their tracks.  They cannot achieve the hyperscale IoT long imagined.  That’s deprived us all of a wealth of new physical-world data streams.

Problem 1:
Batteries Cannot Scale

Logistically, economically, and environmentally, batteries will not scale. Practically, they force users to swap one maintenance event for another.

Limited Lifetimes

Batteries require inevitable, irregular, unpredictable maintenance cycles that erases many of the core benefits of remote monitoring.  Users want real-time insight from afar without having to worry about the health of their IoT device.

Limited Robustness

Batteries are not designed for the harsh environmental settings characteristic of many real-world IoT applications.  Instead, these environments rapidly deplete already finite battery lifetimes.

Limited Data

Batteries force vendors to employ duty-cycling techniques to conserve a finite power supply.  This leads to gaps in the quality and quantity of application data that can often reduce efficacy and value.

Why Can’t Batteries Power the Internet of Things?

913 M
daily battery replacements in a trillion-sensor world
28 B
person labor force to maintain batteries
2.25
labor hours added each day to a 10k asset facility
Batteries represent a logistically prohibitive maintenance problem that requires a mind-boggling maintenance workforce, presenting a daunting challenge for individual facilities where maintenance resources are already at capacity.

Problem 2:
Today's Wireless Cannot Scale

Existing wireless protocols are not optimized for large-scale
wireless sensor networks deployed throughout the physical world.

Limited Range

Existing wireless protocols are unable to reliably cover sprawling industrial plants & facilities .

Limited Density

Existing wireless protocols are unable to support more than tens of devices per a single gateway.

Limited Penetrability

Existing wireless protocols are unable to overcome the many physical interferers in most real-world settings.