A new body, the Wireless IoT Forum, has been launched to “support and promote the deployment of the Internet of Things worldwide …[and] to drive the widespread adoption of wireless wide-area networking technologies in both licensed and unlicensed spectrum.”
The Forum says it will work with key stakeholders from across the value chain to agree requirements that inform and accelerate standards development and deployments. So far no members have been identified. The founding members will be revealed at the M2M World Congress in London on 28 April 2015.
The Forum will hold its first Plenary the following day and says it is actively recruiting new members. For enquiries and more information about joining contact Christine Wong.
The organisation is offering three levels of membership: Executive Board Members; Full Members; and Developer Membership. The latter is open to both individuals and firms “committed to the creation of IoT related applications or involved in, or with responsibility for, requirements capture and testing, of application programs.”
Will Franks, previously CTO and founder of Ubiquisys, the small cell vendor acquired by Cisco, has been appointed chairman and William Webb, president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) who has also held senior positions with UK comms regulator Ofcom has been named as CEO.
Web said: “The wireless Internet of Things is bringing connectivity and control to an order of magnitude more devices, however there is a very real risk of fragmented standards and technologies holding back the development of the market. There has also been a tremendous amount of work done in the IoT world across a wide range of technologies. As in the cellular world, the success of this will lie in the promotion of open standards. The Forum will work tirelessly to make this a reality in the IoT world.”
The Forum has already set up four working groups:
- Marketing & Requirements Group focused on gathering and communicating requirements and marketing and communications;
- Applications Group to review standard APIs (ETSI M2M, OMA, Hypercat, application specific APIs eg. Talq) and the prioritisation of LPWA applications, market size, business case, requirements;
- Connectivity Group to assess radio access for LPWA, network configurations, security, provisioning and network management;
- Regulatory Group to harmonise global license-exempt regulations and availability of licensed spectrum, co-existence with neighbouring applications.
The Forum say it is also “committed to a public facing publications program to inform, advocate and help drive consensus.”
