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| Jean Marc Coté, 1899, el futuro |
Binstock señala tres fuentes importantes de inmadurez: seguridad, infraestructura de red, y estándares:
In the case of IoT, the obstacles are significant: In addition to many secondary issues, network infrastructure, security, and data formats are the salient questions. The last two items, especially security, are important obstacles. Security violations will no longer mean just the simple, but now accepted, bother of waiting for new credit cards and monitoring your credit profile. Rather, a breach means access to very personal data about you, your family, your car, your home, your possessions. The danger is significant. If I can read sensor data in your house, I might well be able to know that despite the lights being on, the TV playing, and the car in the driveway, there is nobody home. And equally frightening, I might be able to issue commands to the various connected devices.
However, security alone is not a big enough obstacle to prevent the IoT. It's just one that will need to be handled before mass adoption. Network infrastructure, however, is a whole different story. If each device becomes an Internet endpoint, there is little doubt that IPv4 will run out of numbers almost immediately (as it's been on the verge of doing for much of this decade). While it's certainly possible that NAT will allow devices to operate behind a single IP address and then post data for retrieval elsewhere, this is not the design generally presented nor one that is particularly desirable. It seems fairly clear that for IoT to become a reality, the world needs to move to IPv6. Most ISPs today and most networked devices are IPv6-ready, but only a tiny fraction have actually switched over. This issue alone will add several years to full IoT adoption.
Finally, there are the questions about agreement over data formats, APIs, and programming conventions. As has occurred frequently in the past, whenever new important technologies arise, there is a first wave of standards that are mostly patches on the problem, followed by more robust and more widely accepted standards that truly enable interoperation. We are far from getting accord on those matters, in part because of the problem left unstated by so many vendors: Except for a few medical devices and the occasional smart thermostat — all of which are crude implementations of IoT — there is no large-scale implementation. Everything is experimental, prototype-stage, exploration. All of which is indeed good, but hardly suggests that significant roll-outs are at hand or even imminent.
