Ha ha, apparently proselytizing about the “Internet of Things” is trendy again. Don’t hold your breath kids; until IPv6 is a thing that’s really a thing, enjoy your “small home network of things”, where your game console, thermostat and toaster have 192.168.x.x IP addresses dangling from your cablemodem, and require a 3rd-party cloud service to mediate contact with your neighbor’s toaster*.
Seriously though… if anybody but major datamining companies are going to get remotely enthusiastic about this IoT business, two things need to happen: IPv6 and dirt-cheap low-bandwidth wireless uplinks (think cellphone plan with pay-by-the-byte or 512kb/month dataplans and low/no monthly maintenance fees) so that all the applications (smart stoplights, weather/pollution sensors, whatever) that would benefit from not dangling off someone’s cell plan or cablemodem don’t have to do so. Maybe on the 3rd revival of the IoT hype, about 10 years from now, it’ll really catch on and be actually kind of useful. (See also: “M2M”.)
* The latter shit-uation is due in equal parts to headaches around NAT traversal, service/peer discovery, and the fact that nobody serious (read: businesses) wants to throw in for an open platform when there’s a snowflake’s chance they could parlay their own proprietary stuff into the One True IoT Service. Even with IPv6 and cheap-as-free radio/cell/satellite pipes, the “IoT ecosystem” (I cringe just saying that) won’t be completely free of the need for a centralish service/peer discovery mechanism and (for power-limited systems) somebody acting as mailbox/aggregator/push notifier/whatchamacallit so that the low-power endnodes can talk to one another despite randomly popping onto the network for just a few seconds at a time. Still, a backend you can download and drop on your own cheapo web hosting account if you didn’t want to be tied to said 3rd-party cloud service would be huge in making this, well, A Thing.
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