BT, Accenture and Cisco found Wireless IoT Forum board

Following its launch in March, the Wireless IoT Forum has announced its founding board members, featuring BT, Cisco, Accenture and Telensa, among others.

The forum is a collaborative industry effort designed to help further define the requirements of the wireless WAN in an IoT era. Specifically, the group claims it is looking to drive the widespread adoption of wireless WAN tech by removing fragmentation and drive consolidation around a minimal set of standards for licensed and license-except wireless solutions

Ensuring the interoperability of solutions running throughout the entire IoT stack is one of the primary challenges associated with bringing the Internet of Things to fruition. As such, CEO of the WIoT Forum William Webb believes solving compatibility issues remains key to driving the broad scale adoption of IoT.

“…the risk presented by fragmentation remains very real,” he said. “Without widely-agreed open standards we risk seeing pockets of proprietary technology developing independently, preventing the benefits of mass-market scale. We are delighted today to be announcing our inaugural membership and to begin work to drive towards a collective view on the right way to deliver widespread IoT services.”

BT’s Mark Harrop reckons the IoT industry should look at using GSM as a benchmark for collaboration. “As the success of the GSM standard in the mobile world showed, working to open industry standards is critical to creating the necessary situation for mass market success,” he said. “By aligning the complete value chain in defining and promoting these standards the Wireless IoT Forum is ideally suited to make the Internet of Things a success.”

Under the remit of the association are a variety of working groups, focussing on four core areas; including marketing and requirements; review of applications and standard APIs; connectivity and networking challenges, including configurations, security and radio access for low power wide area networks; and finally regulation.

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