“The need of promoting innovation and harnessing the potential of Internet of Things (IoT) is imperative for solving practical problems in India. All initiatives in IoT should translate into business models which can be replicated across sectors,” Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said while inaugurating a seminar on IoT, reported Zee Business.
PTI reported that the event was jointly organised by Department of Telecommunications in collaboration with New Delhi chapter of global telecom industry body GSM Association. Sundararajan also underlined the need to work across silos in technology, policy, regulation, licences, and use cases. She said that there should be a drive to spread awareness and initiate capacity building across several key ministries like health, agriculture, transport, urban development and energy as use cases will be initiated from these ministries.
The seminar is the first among series of capacity building programmes planned with the support of GSMA as per the bilateral agreement between DoT and GSMA signed during Mobile World Congress 2018 at Barcelona.
Technology considerations for IoT, including the spectrum allocation, business models for IoT, and policy considerations were discussed during the seminar, an official statement said.
Under IoT all products including car, air conditioners, television, electricity meters etc can be connected and operated with help of internet from even remote locations. The Department of Telecom has already issued guidelines for SIMs that can be used for IoT devices including eSIM. IoT deployment is one of the important focus technology area in the draft National Digital Communication Policy 2018 released recently.
As per recent estimates, IoT market in India stands at USD 5.6 million with 200 million connected units in 2016 and this is expected to grow to USD 15 billion with 2.7 billion units by 2020, the statement said.
