President of Sprint Business invites IoT innovators to partner with carrier.
AUSTIN, Texas – Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son envisions 1 trillion devices connected to the internet, and the carrier’s engineers and executives want to plan for that network. Jan Geldmacher, president of Sprint Business, explained the vision in a keynote address at this week’s Enterprise IoT Summit.
Geldmacher said the network of the future will be a converged network, combining wireless, wireline, Bluetooth, LoRa, Sigfox and unlicensed spectrum. He said mobile networks are about to be part of a sea change that will impact all of society, which he described with a quote from Son.
“The boom in the rate at which we are starting to collect, analyze and ultimately glean knowledge from data is like the Cambrian explosion, the period during which prehistoric creatures developed the five senses,” Geldmacher said in quoting Son.
“When you think about what’s next you really need to think about the megatrends,” Geldmacher said, noting demographic changes, globalization and digitization are all impacting network traffic. “Our network infrastructure is not really prepared to deal with all these trends yet.”
“We are talking about an explosion of data volumes of probably a factor of 2,400,” Geldmacher said. “We are talking about creating latencies that come close to the reaction time of a human being.”
Geldmacher compared today’s internet of things to the internet in 1997, meaning the basic technology is falling into place but people have not really figured out all the things they can do with it.
“It’s time to innovate now,” Geldmacher said. “If you talk about how the market is divided in the IoT space I think it’s not relevant, because we’re just beginning.”
Network operators are just one part of the IoT ecosystem, Geldmacher said, explaining other players are the system integrators; the hardware manufacturers; the wireless module and modem providers; the applications platform providers; and the software vendors.
“I offer to those in the room that want to partner, we are ready to partner,” Geldmacher said, adding he encouraged companies that want to make IoT technology part of their business to be brave and to believe the future is not as unpredictable as it may seem. “I think the future looks predictable if you just anticipate what’s happening in technology and apply it in the right way.”
Geldmacher said 94% of IoT investments yield some return on investment. Geldmacher also shared results from a recent survey of enterprises looking at IoT deployments, and listed the benefits that companies say they expect. The expectation named most often was streamlined operations, followed by higher productivity; better safety, security and monitoring; better customer service; improved automation; and increased revenue.
