Key highlights
- The article questions the usefulness of rigid labels like "Industrial Internet of Things," encouraging engineers to prioritize practical function over terminology.
- Just as IIoT often doesn’t involve actual internet use, many industry terms can be misleading.
Maybe you’ve heard the famous history-class joke that during much of its existence the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, Roman or an empire. It’s a well-known reminder that many descriptions and labels live on like zombies, long after they’ve lost all applicability and credibility, and become positively unhelpful.
It’s probably apparent where I’m going. As I’ve said before, I really dislike the name Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) because it’s just more Internet. Its saving grace was that its participants had to use Internet protocol (IP) or something close to it like HTTPS or TCP/IP. This was the only guardrail that gave the IIoT topic a solid definition and outline.
Unfortunately, while interviewing for this issue’s “IIoT tries new rolls” cover story, several sources claimed that IIoT didn’t have to use the Internet. News to me, but when several people say it unbeknownst to each other, I start paying closer attention.
I know I should hold it firm in demanding that IIoT actually use Internet, or it just should be called networking or something. It’s logical and reasonable. Sadly, many if not most humans are immune, and situations and practices arise that make no sense.
However, the good news is that even chaotic change will eventually happen upon something positive, even if it’s small, travels indirectly, and comes at a high price.
Plus, even though my education in many fields is superficial and limited to the content I generated, I’ve learned that changeable names and descriptions can mean that what I think I’m seeing is actually something else.
For example, a few Saturday nights ago, I was at Gwangalli Beach in Busan, South Korea, for the “Cyberpunk” edition of the weekly, 12-minute Gawngalli M Drone Light Show. That night’s “Cyberpunk” edition was an astounding event with hundreds of small drones flying in huge and incredibly tight formations, and using their brightly colored lights to construct and animate all kinds figures and characters.
They zipped around above the water round in an area that seem to fill much of the space between the beach and a full-sized suspension bridge. And at the end of the show, the drones dutifully lined up in vertical rows, and landed at one end of the beach.
Given the scale of their animations, I figured the drones must use enormous amounts of wireless networking, communications and data processing to coordinate their moves in relation to each other. However, I was quickly disabused of that assumption by two young aerospace engineers in the crowd, who informed me the drones aren’t linked and don’t communicate with each other. They told me every move and flash of light they make during their performance is programmed in ahead of time, and that each drone completes its own flight path unaware of the others. It’s only because their individual and subtly different paths occur in the same place and time that it looks like they’re actively working together.
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Similar to most magic tricks, this revelation seemed like a bit of a cheat, but it’s a cheat that gets its job done.
This reminded me of how IIoT developers and users are employing Unified Name Space (UNS) uses its common naming strategy to get data from different devices and networks by making them the same, or how Process Automation - Device Information Model (PA-DIM) standard uses a protocol-agnostic way to present device information using OPC UA’s information-sharing model to reach IT-level systems. Uniform documentation isn’t truly open networking, but it gets the communication job done.
Consequently, as logical as consistent definitions can be, it might be more useful to focus on what works in reality, rather than what label is used.
