The Internet of Things has been a work in progress for more than three decades, since a couple of engineers showed how a toaster could be connected to the Internet. Some of the central questions raised in the wake of that event–namely why, at what cost, how to implement and manage IoT environments–persist today.
It might be time for a refresh of the whole concept, so enter “Ambient IoT,” a term which suggests something that not only is all around us, connected to everything, but also existing atmospherically, requiring very little human involvement or intrusion into human lives.
“The term is derived from ambient computing, which has been around for years,” said Steve Statler, CMO and ESG Lead at Wiliot, which offers IoT Pixel devices that can be attached to a variety of assets along with a cloud-based Visibility Platform to help manage them and all the incoming data and analytics they generate. The company is backed by luminaries such as Verizon, Qualcomm, Samsung, and NTT, and is one of the most aggressive promoters of Ambient IoT, with Statler having led a session on the concept at this week’s Mobile World Congress event in Las Vegas.
The notion of ambient computing has indeed been around for a long time, and even back in 2015, as companies from a variety of sectors already were struggling to get past IoT hype and into commercial value. Deloitte Consulting advised in a paper, “Business leaders should elevate discussions of the ‘Internet of Things’ to the power of ambient computing by finding a concrete business problem to explore, measurably proving the value and laying the foundation to leverage the new machine age for true business disruption.”
Fast forward several years, and that “concrete business problem” has made itself known in the form of supply chain disruptions and management problems that have affected a multitude of industries. Companies like Wiliot believe the way to solve it is with Ambient IoT.
Statler said, “Ambient means surrounding, or all around. Ambient IoT is about every single thing around us having a digital identity, connectivity and intelligence: food, medicine, clothing, luggage, documents. The other aspect of ambient IoT is that the readers are everywhere too: in phones, TVs, Wi-Fi, smart speakers, doorbells, cars, appliances, the list goes on.”
Getting many of these things through supply chains effectively and efficiently, especially in the case of food, medicine, and other assets that are either highly perishable or of great commercial value, requires automated and comprehensive visibility and monitoring, along with ubiquitous connectivity. Wiliot is doing its part on the visibility part, continuing to expand what its Visibility Platform can do. The company announced at MWC that it is adding humidity sensing to a platform that already includes capabilities for sensing location, temperature, and carbon emissions.
“We have all been trained to buy online, but the grocery supply chain isn’t designed to support the home delivery and pick up in-store models,” Statler said. “Ambient IoT enables real-time visibility of supply chains and inventory with less labor than current models but with much more accuracy and granular visibility required to reduce mis-picks, mis-shipments, and run a leaner supply chain with lower food waste and better quality.
As for the connectivity part, ambient IoT has been given a major boost by the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP), the organization that creates technology standards for the global mobile industry. 3GPP included Ambient IoT specifications in its Release 19 set of standards that will define the industry’s planned 5G Advanced and 6G network upgrades over the next several years.
While it is unclear exactly when and how ambient computing gave birth to Ambient IoT, Statler credits 3GPP standards engineers with refreshing and elevating the concept.
“Release 19 is scheduled to be complete by the end of 2025,” he said. “It will take time after that for the standard to translate into products [based on] the final standard, but there will be pre-standard products that will benefit from the momentum even before the final standard is released. The work that 3GPP is doing is sparking a competitive race for leadership between 3GPP, IEEE, and BLE (the Bluetooth SIG), and all of this is good for raising awareness and a sense of inevitability which benefits the ecosystem. It also brings the biggest tech companies in the world into an ecosystem pioneered by smaller companies like Wiliot. Enterprises that see large carriers and Wi-Fi companies investing are more motivated to move forward.”
The addressable market could eventually constitute 10 trillion units, according to an ABI Research forecast mentioned by Statler.
“The Ambient IoT represents the mobile market’s biggest disruption since the smartphone,” stated Alon Yehezkely, CTO at Wiliot, in discussing the company’s MWC announcement. “Over 100 million ambient IoT devices came online in 2023, and the market is predicted to grow to billions of devices by 2026 [according to ABI, Wiliot clarified]. This breakneck adoption and exponential scale are indicative of only the types of technologies that disrupt industries and change the world – and no market is better suited to capitalize on this than mobile and telecommunications.”