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Is The Internet Of Things Overhyped In 2018?

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Is IoT overhyped in 2018? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Håkon Hapnes Strand, Data Scientist, on Quora:

The transition to IoT is happening, but it’s happening slowly. The game-changing aspect is the sheer number of devices, not the capabilities of each device. I don’t know of a single use-case where you can go «wow, that changes everything». But once there are tens of billions of low-power devices online, it’s hard not to acknowledge their collective impact.

The transition to IoT is happening as we speak. In fact, IoT is expected to overtake smartphones as the largest consumer of internet traffic this year.

I have worked on numerous IoT implementation projects myself over the last three years. These projects usually aren’t noticeable outside of the industry though. Most people think of IoT as smart homes, but that’s not the only application area. In fact, it’s not even in the top 10 application areas that are being invested in right now.

The major applications are related to industry. Smart factories, industry 4.0, smart buildings, smart energy, smart cities, machine-to-machine and car-to-car communication, smart agriculture, not to mention healthcare. That’s where things are happening. Not turning on and off lightbulbs with your smartphone.

We’re currently in the first generation of IoT. What we’re doing right now is collecting data from dumb devices and aggregating it in centralized cloud solutions. In the next generations, we’ll see edge analytics and intelligent networks. Right now we’re mostly using IoT devices as sensors. In the future, they will be increasingly used as actuators too. This will have an impact on virtually every industry out there. It’s not a question of if, but when, this will happen.

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