IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021 - 55

I am using the word facilities-the networking is
done using the facilities. Networking is done as
an app rather than as a billable service.
This ability to share connectivity works just
as well in a village. Rather than having each
household operate its own networks, it makes
more sense to pool their resources and hire professional
staff to operate the facilities, just like
the community hires professionals to maintain
streets and other facilities.
We can then assume connectivity for schools,
healthcare, environment monitor, and much more.
There is also a bonus in that livestock that wander
can be tracked using any available connectivity. In
parts of India where tracking elephants is important,
simple radios can allow them to be tracked as
they roam over a larger area.
OPEN CONNECTIVITY
When you add a smart device to your home network,
you do not worry about the monthly subscription
for each additional lightbulb. When you
have connectivity on a farm, you do not have a
monthly fee for each crop monitor or each sheep.
You just connect the device, and you are done.
Imagine being able to take your medical monitor
with you without having to worry about a subscription
or pairing it with the right phone. It just
works-It does not take a high-speed network, but
it does require being able to assume connectivity.
The facilities become a resource, just like a path
in a village is a resource. The value is not in a given
wire or a given brick on a path. The value is on the
whole. When you walk down the street, you should
not have to negotiate with each access point.
And, given that the community is pooling the
resources, there is no need to prevent people
from connectivity just to charge a monthly fee.
The community is the owner.
This is very liberating. It allows the focus to
shift to taking advantage of the opportunities,
and it creates a virtuous cycle as it encourages
investment in shared capacity and the increased
capacity leads to more opportunity. This is why
we have VoIP-it took advantage of the capacity
for the web, which is fortunate. Before VoIP was
a thing, it would have been hard to explain why
we need to provide special capacity.
That is the real value in open connectivity
or what I call a PPI. A PPI is a market-based
approach-the value is in the whole, so we come
together to pay for the whole.
LEAVING THE VILLAGE
You connect your home network with the
larger world by buying a " fat pipe, " AKA a broadband
connection shared by all the devices on
your home network. In the same way, the village
or farm coops pool their resources to pay for a
high-capacity connection to the Internet.
The economic benefits of sharing a fat pipe are
compelling-far less than the cost of individual subscriptions
and without limiting the capacity of individual
connections. This is in addition to the
benefits of open connectivity for innovation and the
day-to-day functioning of the community.
The facility approach repeats at scale since
adjacent communities can interconnect their
facilities to create a larger whole and increase
the pool of resources to pay for further connectivity
while having no cost within the growing
reach of the shared connectivity.
The key is to understand the power of shared
infrastructure and the compelling advantage of
being able to use any available connectivity
rather than demanding special facilities for each
application.
IT IS ALL CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY
By enabling people to innovate using the
readily available computing devices and open
connectivity, consumer technology comes to the
fore. The software enables individuals to act as
creators in solving their own problems. The community
can then benefit when those solutions
are shared with others.
We already have the Internet for Things. We
just need to recognize it.
&REFERENCES
1. B. Frankston, " Living the beta life, " IEEEConsum.
Electron. Mag., Sept. 2021. [Online]. Available: https://
rmf.vc/IEEEBetaLife
2. P. Chanak and I. Banerjee, " Internet-of-things-enabled
smart villages: An overview, " IEEEConsum. Electron.
Mag., vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 12-18, May 2021.
November/December 2021
55
https://www.rmf.vc/IEEEBetaLife https://www.rmf.vc/IEEEBetaLife
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021
