Smart City project will lend momentum to Internet of Things in India: Intel

Internet of Things (or IoT) will get a push in India through the "100 smart cities" initiative taken-up by the Union government.

According to Doug Davis. Senior Vice President and General Manager of IoT, Intel, the big opportunity for it (IoT) is "the initiative to go out and deploy smart city solutions".

The Union Cabinet gave the go ahead to the "smart city" project earlier this year; and 100 existing cities have been identified with an allocation of nearly Rs 6,000 crore in this regard.

Many countries like the US, Spain, Singapore, etc have envisaged their interest in partnering with India in developing these smart cities.

"If you ask me, then bringing in capacity and solution deployment (for smart cities) is the biggest (scope) in the horizon," he told BusinessLine in response to a question on the opportunities for IoT in India.

IoT in simple terms refer to a network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software and sensor connectivity. This enables the objects to exchange data with other connected devices.

Davis was speaking at a media interaction session at Computex 2015, an annual ICT event.

According to him, the company (Intel) will continue to work with partners - hardware, software and at "multiple layers" to create an ecosystem.

Smart City Solutions

Interestingly, it has already rolled out some smart city solutions (under the IoT) in Taiwan. These include a set of solutions in association with Elitegroup Computer Systems and Tatung for building management that includes connecting devices such as appliances, entertainment systems and security to be on a centralised (internet connected) platform.

Similarly, Intel along with Chungwah Telecom (of Taiwan) will install sensor-enabled "smart poles" which will help map air quality, weather, traffic and even power consumption.

"Going forward we will see increased usage of IoT in segments like public transportation; industrial manufacturing; smart home and city solutions among others. The idea of IoT will also be to improve bottom-line through greater operating efficiencies or new revenue streams," Davis said.

IoT market globally

The global Internet of Things market will grow to $1.7 trillion in 2020 from $655.8 billion in 2014, research firm IDC says in a recent report. The driver for this is expected to be more devices coming online and a bevy of platforms and services growing up around them.

The firm predicts that the number of “IoT endpoints,” connected devices such as cars, refrigerators and everything in between, will grow from 10.3 million in 2014 to more than 29.5 million in 2020.

According to Davis, some 15-odd billion devices are connected to the internet at present; but 85 per cent of them "do not talk to one another" (are not inter connected).

By 2020, some 50 billion devices are expected to be connected; of these 10 billion will be PCs, tablets and mobile phones, he added.

(The writer is at Computex 2015 at the invitation of Intel.)

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