WALKING THE TALK-CAN IoT DO IT WITH OUT 5G

A fresh project from an engg. college cs or ece on IoT may appeal our senses or mind to be part of the ongoing evolutionary development or part of the emerging technologies and hence it is all doable and may be one may wash off responsibility to see the feasibility from practical implementation points of view giving a fair chance to academic talent to flourish; how ever, unless you as a mentor or an SME do not judge the feasibility with given constraints, YOU are not giving the right opportunity to the student to learn the critical aspects such as communication infrastructure or security for instance.

A professor asked this question in a session, why 3G or 2G wireless is not adequate for IoT given these technologies do cater to the kind of data that comes out of the IoT devices. Generally speaking such a question from a student is quite welcome but from a learned scholar, one must look at the traffic engineering aspects, and operator's business models into consideration; while Verizon or AT&T wish to bring out 5G in select cities of USA during this year, the key motivation is to build new eco-system for the new avatars of the internet of things or internet of everything to take Cellular Modus Operandi in their roll out and not get entangled in use cases and proof of concept or prototyping syndromes bodding down the massive deployment opportunities of the services.

Even though the data rate from some of the IoT devices may be less and also the periodicity may be in the budget of the the data rates of 2G or 3G, it makes no sense now to think of going backwards when the world is moving forward, and the operator has to plan ahead in the curve to be green field deployment -early bird opportunity rather than trying to milk the cow in its later years while the technologies we are talking about in 2G or 3G are coming from dilapidated investments which have eroded over couple of decades or market capitalization and frequency plus other constraints

We can not expect miracles out of 2G or 3G now, while 4G and 5G are at the door steps and let go the old and drive in the new