Internet of Things has Gone Mainstream and Verizon is Here to Help You Take Advantage

The Internet of Things (IoT’s) has potential to change how we live, work and play. It could have a greater transformative impact than the internet itself. Done right, IoT opens new doors.

Verizon’s State of the Market: Internet of Things 2016 report highlights how IoT has gone main stream. It provides an early look into how real world IoT deployments are driving new innovations for consumers, and new revenues for businesses across all sectors of the economy. And it showcases how forward-thinking ideas are leveraging the IoT to address social, economic, business and regulatory compliance challenges.

Verizon is changing the world of IoT by:

• Launching ThingSpace: a new IoT platform allowing developers to create applications, customers to manage devices, partners to market their services, and Verizon to launch integrated vertical solutions simply, in an open environment.
• Creating a new dedicated network core and new connectivity options for the next-generation of IoT use cases.
• Driving innovation to tackle big challenges in agriculture, healthcare, the consumer electronics evolution and the sharing economy.
• Commercializing Verizon’s big data analytics engine for IoT deployments.
• Introducing three new end-to-end smart cities solutions, Intelligent Video, Intelligent Lighting and Intelligent Traffic Management.

Calling all developers

One barrier to innovation is that developers of new IoT solutions have to go through multiple channels and cumbersome processes to access the tools they need to create and launch applications. Verizon is radically simplifying that process with ThingSpace, a new self-service web interface.

ThingSpace allows users to manage their IoT environments and related data, end-to-end, from device to network to application. Developers can also build IoT solutions using Verizon’s extensive capabilities and innovation resources. As of today, all developers – even if they are not a Verizon customer – can code and test on the ThingSpace platform. Verizon will roll out hundreds more APIs on the platform throughout 2016.

Optimizing the network for the next-generation of IoT use cases

Another barrier to widespread IoT deployment is the cost to connect to a wide-area network compared to other networks like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee. Non-cellular-enabled IoT devices typically connect to a network through a hub or router, which complicates the set-up for customers and increases the potential for failure. As IoT becomes more widely adopted, network connectivity needs to be simple, reliable and economically viable. Recognizing this market gap, Verizon has created a core IoT network within its LTE architecture optimized for Cat1 devices. Verizon has also worked with partners to embed LTE chipsets in a wide-range of connected machines to automate the provisioning process and make it faster to deploy IoT devices on its wide-area network. These enhancements are designed to meet or exceed the economic requirements of the next-generation of IoT use cases.

Commercializing Verizon’s big data engine for IoT deployments

Understanding how to consume and manage data in order to address customer needs, solve market problems and generate societal benefits is another barrier to scaling IoT. To help businesses and consumers gain more actionable insights, Verizon is powering IoT technology with its sophisticated big data engine. One of the most advanced data and analytics operations of any industry, Verizon’s platform is designed to consume massive amounts of data generated by IoT devices and other machines, analyze it at extremely high speeds and use scalable machine learning to turn raw data into usable intelligence.

Paving the way for smarter cities

The market for smart city solutions is projected to grow by more than 20 percent annually from 2015 to 2020, according to industry analysts. Yet urban areas still suffer from the effects of traffic congestion, aging infrastructure and inefficient use of resources. Over the past year, Verizon has addressed the smart city market with IoT solutions for the connected car and smart grid including GridWide, Verizon Share and hum. Now Verizon is leveraging its network, cloud, security and IoT capabilities to launch Intelligent Video, Intelligent Lighting and Intelligent Traffic Management – three new solutions which will address the issues facing urban and rural communities in a more integrated and scalable way.