1000 Wireless Devices Per Person (By 2017?)


The Economist writes (apparently quoting this pronouncement) that:

By 2017 there could be 7 trillion wirelessly connected devices and objects — about 1000 per person.

Personally, I think their timing is off: I can believe that the hardware can be built by 2017, but not that we figured out how to manage or use them. But regardless of the exact date, it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Look around where you are sitting right now. With this vision, in a few years, at least a hundred should be in sight right now.

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One response to “1000 Wireless Devices Per Person (By 2017?)”

  1. Does that include RFID, or even passive crypto/small-memory wireless devices like you might find in smart cards or key fobs? If so, yeah, I could see thousands per user in that short a time. Maybe even tens of thousands.

    I started with a “If they cost $5 each, and half of them are in my home, then…”, and then thought “well, what are the other half for?”, and I realized that depending on where you draw the line we may already be way closer to that than we thought. Some of those may already cost $.50 each.

    For instance, I was working on a device where my customer wanted to make sure that only their consumables could be used in it. Because of physical constraints we couldn’t get a set of wires to the consumable, but we could put an antenna in the host device and a wireless tag with a cryptographic processor and a little non-volatile storage on the consumable, and arrange to read the consumable’s case that way. For that customer, there’d probably have been a hundred or three of those consumables per customer over the life of the product. Didn’t end up getting to market, but that’s the sort of thing where you can start to rack up wireless devices per consumer *really* fast. And the whole thing, chip plus antenna, fits in a package the size of a dime, we were just going to embed that in plastic during the manufacture.