Internet of Things growing rapidly

Standardization, technology main bottlenecks: forum

China's Internet of Things (IOT) is growing rapidly but technology gap and absence of unified standards continue to present barriers to its development, experts said at a forum in Beijing over the weekend.

The market scale of IOT in China has expanded quickly with an annual growth rate of above 30 percent since 2010, industry experts said Saturday at the New York China Forum, a gathering of experts from China and the US to discuss topics ranging from mobile Internet and medical biochemistry to culture and media.

China's industries related to the IOT, or machine-to-machine connections, had a market scale of 500 billion yuan ($80.05 billion) in 2013, with that of the sensor industry exceeding 120 billion yuan, said a study published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on May 30. In 2015, the country's IOT market scale will surpass 700 billion yuan, the report projected.

Mo Hongbo, a senior engineer with the China R&D Center for Internet of Things, said that China started endeavors in the field of IOT at roughly the same time as the US, although the latter has a higher starting point in key areas such as chips and sensors.

"The most important electronic component that makes the Internet of Things available is sensors. In this field, we still don't have many innovative and competitive companies," Mo said on Saturday.

"We need more industry champions like telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE to propel the drive toward the era of IOT," Mo said.

Wu Kewei, general manager of Beijing Sinoits Tech Co, an intelligent traffic hardware and software maker, said standardization is necessary for the future development of the sector and the government needs to promote standardization as the IOT sector takes shape.

"Traffic video equipment in Beijing, for instance, are made by a number of different companies using their own standards and specifications, which means our current network is a patchwork," Wu said.

"We will have to unify different systems established by different government organizations, and that will require an enormous effort," Wu added.