With the advent of 5G telecommunications, the Internet of Things (IoT) has begun to focus on industrial applications.
“Once upon a time it was about efficiency,” said Eric Sineathe, Chief Architect at AT&T Business. “Now it’s about cost control and customer service.”
Speaking to attendees on the Industrial City Solutions track at IoT Evolution Expo 2022 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Sineathe explained how his company manages its sprawling real-estate empire using remote technology.
His discussion, “Smart Buildings: Beyond HVAC,” focused on AT&T’s efforts to improve the management outcomes for its portfolio of properties.
AT&T manages nearly 250,000 structures, from buildings to sheds. About 2,5000 of them are occupied. The company’s yearly spend on building management is more than $1.5 billion.
AT&T manages more than 1,500 buildings remotely through one pane of glass, Sineathe said. “Most are more than 25 years old,” he said.
Sineathe says ATT&T has been able to shave its management costs by about $600 million/year by employing remote operations. About half that savings has been reinvested back into the project to create shared spaces and flexible work space.
Sineathe said the rush to IoT solutions for industrial applications is driven by impending legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.
“A lot more funding is going to be allocated to those areas,” he said.
Remote management enables bulk management of multiple properties, whereas, “Most buildings have been managed historically as islands,” Sineathe noted.
With island management, data collection is nearly useless. It takes too long. Sineathe pointed to one group that managed 400 buildings. One of the management covenants declared that each building manager had to be interviewed personally before the overall management report could be produced. Interviews took up to nine months. By the time the report came out, it was old news.
“Even before the pandemic occurred, this was a rapid area of expansion,” Sineathe said.
Then came the pandemic, which spurred a rethinking of space usage.
“Up to half our managed space wasn’t occupied before COVID,” he said.
Recently, AT&T partnered with Microsoft to produce a universal IoT connector. The product includes a secure chipset that connects to security systems in the cloud.
“In many cases we can upgrade their IoT security, like HVACs, significantly,” Sineathe said.
The partnership has resulted in a way to provide security to end-to-end sensor transmissions, which Sineathe noted were never designed for security.
Another potential market is connected kitchens. Sineathe noted that all of Starbucks’ coffee makers are connected to the IoT. In places where the backbone connection is weak – like when Starbucks builds a store in a Target – AT&T can provide upgraded services so Starbucks can continue to collect data from its devices.
AT&T is the largest provider of managed IoT services in north America, Sineathe said. The company captures about half the total spend on IoT services in the region, At At&T, IoT programming and management accounts for about 10% of their business.
Edited by
Erik Linask
