The Internet of Things as it's usually presented to consumers has a way of seeming a bit cartoonish and trivial, which only slightly accurate. This triviality—of, say, logging and transmitting trashcan fullness data—is one aspect of a serious and quite real problem clouding the IoT future and even its present. This is the lack of cheap and available wide-area networks available to actually connect these things.

This was raised at a panel earlier this week at the annual Embedded Systems Conference by Syed Hosain, chief technologist at Aeris Communications Inc. Aeris' business model is precisely this: providing "machine-to-machine" (M2M) and IoT networks. It does this largely through its AeroConnect web of 2G and 3G cellular towers, but this service isn't exactly free. Which is a problem when we start talking about connecting devices for "lighter" purposes. As is often imagined, the future IoT includes a lot of these devices.

EE Times has a good summary/analysis of the panel, the proceedings of which have not yet been made available to non-attendees of the ESC conference. Hosain's takeaway point is that, "today’s long range machine-to-machine networks generally use wired or cellular links that are widely available but too expensive to be profitable."

But, “I postulate that for the next ten years cellular is the only viable option for that kind of coverage,” Hosain said.