Not long ago I was explaining how the internet works to a senior citizen at the launch of a recently held e-business application.
I was able to explain that the Internet is a global web of computers, which is termed as the worldwide web, or the www and this is the collection of millions of computers remotely, providing web pages that displays on computers.
Now this alone will not get a user access the internet. Before one can receive contents from an internet service provider, a set of end-to-end protocols (Internet Protocol) have to be established on both ends. The personal computer or mobile device (recipient) and www Server (provider)
So, I went on to say that, when you intend visiting any publicly hosted website, in the address bar of the Internet browser application, you declare the protocol identifier, which is the hypertext transfer protocol what is called the http:// followed by www then the domain name which is the name of the website which ends with a.com,.biz,.org or any other. The structure of the website address is what is termed as the Uniform Resource Locator. (URL). If this address is valid to a remote server hosted online, then the pages requested will load up within seconds.
It is worth noting that establishing connection for an internet access primarily has to do with protocols at various levels of the end to end connection, so suffice to say that there is a high probability that a website you are visiting could not display due to a breach in one or many Internet Protocols.
With the emergence of the Internet in the 90's till the early 2000's there was the limitations of Internet access to the end-user only by means of the personal computers and laptops but this monopoly was broken with the development of the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) which was adapted by Mobile Service Providers in the beginning of the year 2000.
This is the development that gave rise to a more sophisticated regime of handsets within a short time with the birth of the much hyped WAP technology, the protocol phased-out within the first 5 years, WAP was no longer the protocol of choice for emerging devices when bandwidth became the De facto for interactive streaming with the development of more reliable faster mobile internet protocols on stream.
Just a little over a decade and a half, and we see an overwhelming digital culture where household appliances, lifestyle gadgets and consumable electronics are in tight competition with traditional mobile devices over the internet space. From Pens sunglasses, apparels, television sets almost every other appliance and device is internet ready birthing a new identity as Smart Devices.
The emergence of smart devices and the redesigning of our traditional elements is what is being labeled in recent times as Internet of Things (IoT). Sounds like internet of everything to kitchen ware and where incandescent light bulbs are now re-engineered with a more intelligent Light-emitted diode or a more advanced organic LED is able to interact intelligently with other networked devices wirelessly.
Gartner says that, a typical home could contain more than 500 smart devices by 2022 which may include wardrobes, and water sink. And these could be most basic home and in a related report, Fortune Tech, is forecasting that global mobile traffic will grow eightfold over the next four years, reaching 30.6 exabytes monthly by 2020 due to the explosion of IoT and what's interesting is the fact that the average smartphone user today consumes about 1.4 GB of data every month and this is expected to increase to an average of 8.9 GB.
IoT affects the average household and the behavior of the general consumer at large and where ever you find yourself either indirectly in the technology paradigm, there is lots of prospect and opportunities that can be maximized for the benefits of the general society.
The consumer industry drives a fundamental paradigm in the way users interact and personalize devices by transmitting small amounts of data from these devices in the monitoring, controlling and sensing functionalities imbedded in them.
51% of the world's population in 2017 are occupants of the Zettabyte era where it is estimated that we are reaching a data consumption of 1.2 Zettabyte or 1.2 billion Terabyte.
A bold statement by former CEO of CISCO, John Chambers states that there will 50 billion devices online within 5 years.
This may not be a bloated estimation, considering the fact that Facebook application alone consumes a daily rate of 600 Terabyte of data from user interactions.
Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt has disclosed a sterling statistic which states that we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.
Globally 8.4 billion things will be interconnected to the Internet of Things in 2017 according to Gartner Report and it goes on to state that 5 billion of which will be consumer appliances alone.
The more connected things we have, the more the rise of the data economy and how well information can be structured for the improvement of life and modernization of culture.
IoT is getting rid of our dependence on manual procedures and with a connectivity framework, knowledge sharing and access to information is so crucial and just a matter of time, data quality standards of information will need to be enforced for more things being connected to have a data quality compliance.
A vital interest in the IoT dimension are the collection and storage of data by medical equipment being connected to securely share patient's medical history and medical research between consultants and medicine research.
Beyond motor vehicle and consumer appliances making waves in IoT, the peak of the paradigm will happen in the near future where “things” like hemodialysis, ventilators, stethoscopes, weight-scale will become intelligent in their data collection and storage capabilities on cloud in the total improvement of health research and the speed of health delivery.
