Earlier today on IoT Evolution World, I wrote a piece about IoT company Wiliot and its flagship innovations that go hand in hand: Wiliot’s IoT Pixels and the Wiliot Cloud. The story highlights the part-and-parcel nature of the IoT Pixels and Cloud, and how they come together to comprise Wiliot’s IoT Visibility Platform. It also reports on the latest from Wiliot – its IoT Pixels and Cloud now enable real-time humidity sensing, which is legitimately huge IoT news.
Why? Well, because products across supply chains have different humidity handling requirements. We’re talking from food to pharmaceuticals, farm equipment to niche electronics, and computer chips to chocolate chips – this establishes a new baseline for precise product handling, product freshness, and overall efficacy and safety. The Wiliot platform already is able to monitor location and carbon footprint, and it identifies if and when product misshipments occur, granting immediate insights. (And reducing waste, as the IoT Pixels are battery-free and consciously constructed.) This humidity-sensing achievement is, to word this quite casually, “on a whole ‘nother level.”
That said, you’re reading this on 5G Evolution World because of an aspect to this story that I didn’t want to cram into original piece, and it pertains to Wiliot and 5G Advanced.
Quick context, for those wondering: 5G Advanced is a term being used to describe how 5G will be “evolved to its fullest, richest capabilities,” as one writer from Nokia put it. 5G Advanced will create a foundation for more demanding applications and a wider range of use cases than we currently see. It will also introduce everyone’s favorite buzzwords of 2023 – AI and ML, or artificial intelligence and machine learning. This will build upon 5G for improved performance, network optimization, energy efficiency, and also for backwards compatibility and serving legacy 5G devices, when the time comes.
It's expected that 5G Advanced will offer “20% higher data rates compared to current 5G” and, as a writer from Ericsson described, “ will enrich 5G architecture to support network automation, RAN management and analytics” and more.
Again, these are expectations; 5G Advanced and even 6G, depending on who you ask, are either right around the corner, on the cusp but not quite here yet, or a pipedream that we won’t experience until at least 2030.
Still, it’s worth taking a peek behind the Wizard’s curtain, just to see if Oz is on the right track.
But, I digress. Back to 5G Advanced in relation to Wiliot.
With humidity-sensing capabilities now part of its ambient IoT Visibility Platform, Wiliot previewed the possibilities of IoT Pixels, its Cloud, and 5G Advanced recently at MWC Las Vegas 2023 last month. Wiliot presented how its real-time humidity sensing – with temperature, location sensing, and carbon emissions measurement, to boot – will lend “unprecedented visibility into supply chains for the world’s largest companies and their telecommunications providers.”
That quote is from the initial announcement. Here’s one directly from Alon Yehezkely, CTO at Wiliot:
“This capability,” Yehezkely explained, “is set to revolutionize the telecommunications industry when it becomes standardized in 5G Advanced and 6G. It also demonstrates how important ambient IoT is, and how it represents the mobile market’s biggest disruption since the smartphone. Over 100-million ambient IoT devices came online in 2023, and the market is predicted to grow to billions of devices by 2026. This breakneck adoption and exponential scale are indicative of only the types of technologies that disrupt industries and change the world.”
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
