The internet of things (IoT) is a catch-all term for the growing number of electronics that aren't traditional computing devices, but are connected to the internet to send data, receive instructions or both.

There's an incredibly broad range of things that fall under that umbrella: Internet-connected "smart" versions of traditional appliances like refrigerators and light bulbs; gadgets that could only exist in an internet-enabled world like Alexa-style digital assistants; internet-enabled sensors that are transforming factories, healthcare, transportation, distribution centers and farms.

What is the internet of things?

The IoT brings the power of the internet, data processing and analytics to the real world of physical objects. For consumers, this means interacting with the global information network without the intermediary of a keyboard and screen; many of their everyday objects and appliances can take instructions from that network with minimal human intervention.

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State and local governments are working overtime to provide Internet service to all who need it during the pandemic, pushing out a range of ad hoc projects designed to keep members of their communities connected.

With Internet access ever more crucial in the age of social distancing, it seems clear that COVID-19 has deepened the digital divide – less well-off Americans are less likely to have the kind of reliable home Internet connection that they will need in order to work remotely, access important government services and stay in touch with family members.

Some local governments, however, are working to close the gap.

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It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find parts of the economy that haven’t been affected by the burgeoning Internet of Things as instrumentation and networking technology combine to offer unprecedented new levels of visibility into the operation of everything from jet engines to breweries.

Even a business sector as traditional as agriculture is starting to change in response to the availability of connected sensors and machinery. We spoke to three working agricultural professionals to see how the technology of the IoT is changing the way they work.

Drones to count plants

For Caleb Hinkle, a graduate student studying crop and soil science at Virginia Tech, agricultural IoT has meant simplification and new capabilities. His work centers on comparative crop research, and one of his main IoT tools to make those comparisons is drone photography. Photographs can be analyzed to determine plant counts and surface area in large numbers of small plots, to compare which agronomic practices produce the best results.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. recently approved some wireless spectrum within the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi 6 use. This will nearly quintuple the existing Wi-Fi 6 spectrum. The version of Wi-Fi that will take advantage of this spectrum is called Wi-Fi 6E. Existing Wi-Fi 6 clients operate within the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands, so they will not be immediately able to access this new 6GHz band. Deploying Wi-Fi 6 may be appealing to enterprises’ employees now working remotely, many of whom are working off of Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 4 networks. Network World senior writer Jon Gold joins Juliet to discuss what Wi-Fi 6E, when to adopt the much-hyped Wi-Fi 6 and what it means for the future of networking.

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A company called Kinsa is leveraging IoT tech to create a network of connected thermometers, collecting a huge amount of anonymous health data that could offer insights into the current and future pandemics.

The company’s founder and CEO, Inder Singh, said that the ability to track fever levels across the U.S. in close to real time could be a crucial piece of information for both the public at large and for decision-makers in the healthcare sector and government.

The system’s networking technology is relatively straightforward – the thermometer connects via Bluetooth to an app on the user’s phone, which reports anonymized data back to Kinsa’s cloud over the Internet. Singh emphasizes that the company only organizes data down to the county level, and asserts that identifying individuals through Kinsa’s data is more or less impossible.

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A team of researchers from MIT has developed a novel method of tracking COVID-19 transmission among the population, using Bluetooth “chirps” that could automatically trace COVID-positive contacts and warn those who have potentially become infected, without violating their privacy.

The system is called PACT, or Private Automated Contact Tracing. It works by sending random strings of numbers via low-power Bluetooth from a user’s smartphone to other nearby devices using the system, creating a coded list of smartphones that a given user has been close to in the past 14 days.

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A proposed FCC rule would allow Wi-Fi 6 devices to make unlicensed use of an additional range of wireless spectrum, which would more than quadruple the number of channels available to Wi-Fi routers.

While that might be good news for enterprises seeking higher density Wi-Fi deployments,  current license holders of the 6GHz spectrum are concerned about interference from unlicensed use.

The driving factor, as ever, is the bottomless demand for spectrum caused by the increasing use of wireless just about everywhere, and the FCC’s announcement cites projections from Cisco that say about 60% of worldwide data traffic will move across Wi-Fi links within the next two years. Using the full 6GHz spectrum – all 1,200MHz of it – is part of the Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard that can’t be put into use until it is freed up by the FCC. With that spectrum extension in place the standard is known as Wi-Fi 6E, and devices with new silicon would be needed to implement it. (Wi-Fi 6E products are expected to hit shelves by the 2020 holiday season, per PC World.)

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An IoT device that tracks coughing and crowd size in real time could become a useful tool for identifying the presence of flu-like symptoms among large groups of people, according to a team of researchers at UMass Amherst.

FluSense, as the researchers call it, is about the size of a dictionary. It contains a cheap microphone array, a thermal sensor, a Raspberry Pi and an Intel Movidius 2 neural computing engine. The idea is to use AI at the edge to classify audio samples and identify the number of people in a room at any given time.

Since the system can distinguish coughing from other types of non-speech audio, correlating coughing with the size of a given crowd could give a useful index of how many people are likely to be experiencing flu-like symptoms.

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The largest FCC auction in history as measured by the amount of spectrum sold ended this week as 3.4GHz worth of the country’s airwaves were snapped up by 28 companies.

The majority of that spectrum designated for 5G was purchased by companies affiliated closely with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

These results combined with similar auctions held in 2019, mean that more than 5GHz of spectrum has been sold off over the past two years, according to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “To put that in perspective, that is more spectrum than is currently used for terrestrial mobile broadband by all wireless service providers in the United States combined,” he said in a statement.

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