Connected lighting will brighten IoT’s future

There is a lot of talk about the IoT and plenty of experimentation, but as of yet, nothing has arisen that will serve as the “killer app” that skyrockets in demand, driving down prices to enable a cascade of applications. But a case can be made that connected lighting might be such an app, strange as it might seem. A commonplace technology that has remained essentially unchanged for a century may be the first to jump-start the IoT revolution.

Depending on to whom you listen, the IoT is expected to comprise 20−50 billion devices by 2020. The belief is that the IoT will be everywhere, affecting virtually all aspects of modern life. But as of yet, IoT applications, while they have been intriguing, have not been compelling enough to explode in the market in the way that pundits have predicted. There are just not enough use cases with a demonstrable economic benefit to initiate self-reinforcing market growth.

The industry is making progress on lowering the cost of connectivity, but not fast enough for the chain reaction of rising demand and corresponding volume-production pricing reductions to really take off. The tens of billions of predicted devices serve such a wide range of applications that the individual solutions fail to reach the volumes needed to build significant production cost efficiencies. What is needed is a single application that, in itself, has the potential to require billions of devices.

Enter connected lighting.

Read the rest of this article on EP's sister publication, EDN.