Talking Business
Recently, I had the opportunity to intern at a well known cellular, wireless carrier’s corporate office. During this period, I had my first realization of the emerging new Internet of Things era communications is making headway into (Salkever, 2001). This new era is driven by machine to machine technology and will allow for less human error and greater efficiency, but will also have negative effects as previous communication responsibilities get replaced by machines .
As technological progress continues to boom, the world of communication is becoming even more focused on efficiency, speed, and face-less communication. As the concentrated competition within the telecommunications market continues to accelerate, so does the quantity of wireless connected machines that are free from human interaction. The result is an emerging new era of machine to machine technology (M2M) and the “Internet of Things”, ultimately leading to the demise of human interaction (Salkever, 2001).
Why So Popular?
As I had learned on the job, new M2M products that erased the “middle man” were on the rise in the wireless B2B world. The technologies were fascinating. For example, products, shipments, and even employees could be tracked 24/7 to ensure efficient work, inventory, shipping pathways, and temperatures were present without a single human interaction being made. M2M occurs when machines “talk” to each other and to intermediary services, eliminating the machine-to-human interaction contact (Salkever, 2001). M2M has opened up a significant opportunity for businesses and technology today due to its ability to increase efficiency and reduce human error (Salkever, 2001).
How does it Work?The storage of data between the machines is within a “cloud” in which a specific IP address is needed to have access to this information and transmit it (Salkever, 2001). The increasing amount of data moving through IP networks and clouds is due to the fact that the hardware needed to store that massive of an amount of data would be way to expensive (Salkever, 2001). Therefore, the cloud is becoming the best option in order to manage and track the Internet of Things (Salkever, 2001). Yet, with amounts of data so large, failures of machine to machine communication could therefore total millions of time-specific inofration, even if just for a few second (Salkever, 2011).
The Negatives
Whether concerning private or public clouds, hackers and corruption are always a negative and important factor to be prevented as the future moves into this new era (Salkever, 2001). The information hackers could obtain would be detrimental if on a government level, or other significant level. Also, failures in clouds do not provide blame (Salkever, 2001). There is no user error to point a finger at and to work to solve a problem towards (Salkever, 2001). The days of simply resetting a machine’s server or image if, for example, traffic lights went out, would be obsolete (Salkever, 2001).
In Conclusion
Although machine to machine technology opens the doors to more efficiency and less human error, the consequences from a M2M errors outweigh those of previous machine-to-human interactions. Before the era of The Internet of Things comes in full force, privacy issues and failure issues must have almost full proof protection (Salkever, 2001).
Link
Citation
Salkever, Alex. (2001). The Internet of Things and the cloud. GIGAOM. Retrieved from
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