CES 2017 (general discussion thread)

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CES 2017 starts January 5. This thread is for general discussion.

http://www.ces.tech/Register-Plan/Full-Schedule

Expect a lot of smart home announcements, many of which may never come to market. Pay particularly close attention to anything which is announced for first or second quarter 2017 as those are likely to be the ones that will actually happen. :wink:

Samsung’s media event will be on the second day. They have not announced any details except that they are releasing a new roomba type vacuum cleaner.

Apple does not participate in CES themselves, but there will be many announcements of devices by third-party companies that will work with HomeKit.

Lots of startups will be presenting prototypes which are often mostly vaporware. But still interesting, particularly in terms of where they think the market is going to go.

Kwikset has promised their new Zwave plus and HomeKit lock models will be ready for market in the first half of 2017, so I expect them to have some on display.

Sylvania/Osram did a pre-release last week of their new Bluetooth RGBW bulbs which will be able to work with HomeKit without a hub. Obviously they’re after hue with that one.

Sonos is skipping CES this year which is…weird. Many many rumors that the Alexa integration previously announced for 2017 is not going well. :disappointed_relieved:

Rumors both ways about whether Wink will be presenting anything. They preannounced a switchmate integration–does that mean they’re enabling their Bluetooth radio for something more than onboarding their own hub?

Last year ADT announced “canopy” which was supposed to allow third-party systems like SmartThings to link up with an ADT monitoring center. But it never came to market. They’re going to have to bring something real to this year’s event to get any buzz at all.

Last year CES was all about televisions. And drones. And virtual reality. And hoverboards (remember those?)

This year, it looks like there will be more of an emphasis on appliances and smart homes, particularly smart assistants and simple use cases. Also self driving cars. But you never know for sure – – if one presentation starts getting a huge amount of buzz, even one of the vaporware ones, everybody else will modify bits of theirs on the fly to fit the new paradigm. :rocket:

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Oh man. Really? I have not seen any rumours but trust your info. I really hope they get this going at some point.

Typically Sonos do not say much about future plans (although yes, they did announce this project some months back). But since then nothing in their official forums. It’s just left to people to speculate.

Perhaps their lack of CES attendance is more to do with the fact they laid a lot of people off recently.

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And just to get this out-of-the-way: there will be a lot of discussion of 5G at CES this year. That’s the next generation mobile Internet technology. So it affects both cell phones and IOT.

Is it real? Sure, there’s a standard, Verizon has a pilot program I think in Arizona someplace, and AT&T has it running in the lab but not the field. It’s a real thing, and it’s definitely faster than 4G at data transmission which is what IOT really cares about.

Is it here? Not a chance. Aside from the aforementioned pilot, it’s not going to be available probably until 2020. There’s a lot to work out first. So while many companies will be talking about how 5G Will enable new use cases, and how they will be ready, right now that’s like talking about landing someone on Mars. Sure, it’s going to happen eventually, but it shouldn’t impact your device selections right now for anything you expect to replace in three years.

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I think it all goes together. Whatever the Amazon project is, it’s not saving the company (Sonos) fast enough to prevent layoffs or give them something shiny to present at CES. :disappointed_relieved:

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Ces is turning into a car show.

I wouldn’t read too much into x, y or z not at ces.

But let’s look at all the things ST announced at CES last year… Wait, nothing came out. Then again they announced a few things at SDC as well, and those didn’t come out either.

My guess is ST might actually show Sammy TV integration (be prepared to be disappointed) and a new mobile UI (again, disappointing) and no new developer support.

I was at CES last year, and refuse to go this year. Call me jaded, but that show is just not what it used to be.

Anyway, hope there are some cool announcements and that they ship soon.

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I can see the speed increase but what other than for Videos. What else can 5G do for IOT that WiFi and 4G LTE couldn’t? Also the data cap by phone providers is a killer.

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The data caps would have to change with 5G, obviously. But based on the consortium, they will.

As far as what it’s good for, lots of discussions, much of it speculative, but basically The intent is to power something like the Artik cloud and its connections to individual devices. Near real-time processing of local sensor device data. It could make microlocation realistic. Facial recognition. Alexa built into almost everything. The local device collects local data but all the decisions get pushed up to the cloud.

There’s also the issue of the number of devices. This is an ongoing problem for current Wi-Fi, as you just max out pretty quickly. This is a specific issue that 5G hopes to address, but as I mentioned, there’s still a lot of work to do.

More technical discussion:

When 5G, the fifth generation of wireless communications technology, arrives in 2020, engineers expect that it will be able to handle about 1000 times more mobile data than today’s cellular systems.

Ding: The previous 1G-4G systems rely on so-called orthogonal multiple access. Take time division multiple access used by 2G as an example: We slice one second into a lot of timeslots with short duration. We then allocate one particular time slot to each user, and one user cannot access a channel allocated to others. Such orthogonal multiple access will be difficult to support for future IoT applications. We will have a lot of devices, and we would have to allocate time slots dedicated to each of them. But in the end this is a luxury we cannot afford, since the number of available time slots and bandwidth resources will be insufficient. This is why multiple orthogonal access won’t work for the 5G.
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Currently there is a lot of research exploring how we can develop non-orthogonal multiple access by putting a number of users into the limited bandwidth channels. Ideally non-orthogonal multiple access can strike a better trade-off between system throughput and user fairness. Of course there is interference between users, which means that some users may experience low data rates. But interestingly in IoT, there are many devices which should be served timely with low data rates. One example is wireless healthcare, where wearable devices (heart monitors, biosensors, etc) need to send patient data timely to hospital severs, but the data rates used by these devices are not likely high. By using non-orthogonal multiple access, we can squeeze in a lot of IoT users/devices with different quality of service requirements into the same time slot or frequency channels. In this sense, the concept of non-orthogonal approaches is very exciting and perfect for the Internet of Things.

And, yes, that makes everything vulnerable to cloud failure, and that’s an issue.

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Catch this strange but interesting comment given to CEPro from the executive director of the Z-Wave Alliance in advance of CES:

Apple HomeKit will finally become a player in the smart home race, with voice control (Siri) and a rapidly growing ecosystem (see our HomeKit/Z-Wave technology demo at CES 2017).
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There will be less appetite from investors and larger companies to invest in early stage companies, resulting in sudden and unexpected mergers & acquisitions. Many of the smaller startups at CES won’t be around next year as they discover that hardware and consumer adoption is hard work.
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Meanwhile, service providers will make a huge dent in consumer acceptance in smart homes as Verizon and Comcast battle for mind-share.
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Standards and platforms will continue to announce new versions, continuing to fragment the industry without necessarily delivering on the promise. Z-Wave will quietly continue to grow its dominance in smart home adoption and ecosystem. — Mitchell Klein, executive director, Z-Wave Alliance

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Agreed. It is a virtual R & D Show

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“Technology demo”, a.k.a “proof of concept”, wow! Do they really expect to get anyone excited about technology demo? :wink:

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ZigBee Alliance’s DotDot a universal IoT language? Sounds interesting. Apparently at CES they will show ZigBee 3.0 devices running DotDot over Thread.

http://www.zigbee.org/the-zigbee-alliance-to-unveil-universal-language-for-the-iot-from-ces-2017-making-it-possible-for-smart-objects-to-work-together-on-any-network/

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/qualcomm-ericsson-t-announce-collaboration-220000896.html

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I remember when Thread was all the IOT talk…

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Ford should be showcasing their new connected vehicle device… Think automatic + forscan + Odin!

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Blink will be releasing a line of security products/sensors:

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Interesting…can you use with Blue Iris w/o monthly service?

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Yep… its showing up on everything. GH might be facing an uphill battle here.

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In the sad but true category: CNET has said that voice control and AI are the two big themes of CES this year. They set up tracking pages: one for everything announced at CES that works with Alexa, and one for everything announced at CES that works with HomeKit. And that’s it. Not even a mention of Google Assistant/Home. :disappointed_relieved:

U Turn Update!!!

You heard it here, uh, second… They’ve added a tracking page for Google home. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

was hoping Google would use this CES – the first since its release – to gain some ground. So far, not so much. Alexa’s announcing lots of new friends and Google Home’s been relatively quiet.

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It’s not much yet. :neutral_face:

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