Our Building Backbone connects to our wireless airways, which in turn connects our building users to the world. We need to explore how to make the building user experience (UX) seamless and amazing.
This is the next chapter in our Building Book of Digital Transformation. This online resource started over two years ago with Sensing the Change, and I still find myself asking, are we fully sensing the changes IoT is bringing to our industry? It’s hard to believe we are now more than 50 chapter in to our ongoing journey!
Some folks in the industry call me a Storyteller. I first took that as a shot to the value of my commentary, but I have since come to embrace role as just one more way to help get my messages out.
In this post from controltrends.org, I am referred to as an “Industry Oracle.” Although I am guilty of presenting and even preaching our present evolution as interpreted by me into a storyline, I think more of myself as a Content Connector linking to what is published and now read online. I am having fun storytelling, preaching, prophesying and simply sharing my views and observations. Thanks for your tolerance.
Our Wireless Skin, when connected to the urban and global airways that transmit mobile data from the smart city and our buildings must seamlessly provide a friendly, open transition to our building backbone of glass and steel.
In my opinion, the next 5G movement will not come from the mobile cell service providers as they are now immobilized with the scope of change and functional creep of 5G. It will be the progressively informed building owners that will move to their own in-building wireless to provide a never-before-seen user experience (including location services with occupant heat mapping).
This may be driven in retrofit faster than new construction as an old building without network infrastructure needs DAS (Distributed Antenna System) to provide existing cell phone survival, and near 5G is easy to piggyback on new DAS.
It appears clear to me the low voltage power for our edge devices will come from a USB plug-in at every light fixture or else be generated autonomously—not POE—because future tenant networking infrastructure will be wireless.
As mobility data is amassed from ride-hailing, dockless bikes and e-scooters, cities need tools to responsibly track, store, and analyze it. This article from www.axios.com explains how Mobility data could give cities new tools to improve equity.
We need to add our buildings to this list of things amassing mobility data and determine how our building data fits into this movement.
Municipalities across the country have joined together to create a new global non-profit organization called the Open Mobility Foundation to support the development of open-source software that provides scalable mobility solutions for cities.
From this article by Troy Harvey, CEO, PassiveLogic, Establishing a Smart Building Industry Standard:
We spend the first hour of a meeting establishing what we mean by smart, how smart is smart, navigating disbelief, educating about new technology, and finally arriving at common ground.