Utilities and services
Like commercial enterprises, government instrumentalities and utilities now rely almost entirely on the Internet and the telecommunications backbone (email, telephony and file transfer); for business to business (B2B) communications; to manage their supply chain; and for web based interfaces to inform their customers and sell product and services.
In addition the information sharing needs of these businesses include a wide range of private networks often using older narrow bandwidth radio; copper; or more recently private, single purpose (dark) fibre. Among these are: fire services (including bushfire monitoring); police and emergency services; energy and water utilities; railways and road traffic control; health; and education. Many of these use specialist communications protocols; often based on small run (specialist) electronics and software. As the Internet has grown economies of scale and investment, both hardware devices and associated software have reduced prices to a degree that an independent network (particularly one not utilising TCP/IP internetworking technology) is difficult to justify on cost grounds.
Much of this falls into the general classification: 'Spatial Information'. This is often augmented by satellite based position location (GPS) and it is increasingly common for business to attach a latitude and longitude mobile as well as stationary plant and equipment. The resulting changes are typically reported using the cellular radio network (3G or 4G) linked by internetworking protocols. New markets already evident include land management and stock control and automated 'assisted' farming. A wide range of other possibilities exist; ranging from self navigating vehicles to web enabled services to manufacturing; like tracking deliveries or finding the nearest supplier of a component or service.
For example the electricity grid now needs to be much 'smarter'. At one time the transmission system consisted of a small number of large generators delivering electricity in one direction to some large industrial customers and a distributor. Now it has an increasing number of small generators and power can suddenly peak or drop away (as the wind blows or the sun comes out) and/or flow in either direction. Control issues are vastly more complicated. At the retail distributor, electricity is distributed at11kV and delivered at 415/240V through numerous substations; and some customers wish to feed back (in) to the retail network. Progressively every one of these substations needs to be connected back to a control system to facilitate delivery and optimise resources.
In due course, present 'smart meter' trials will lead to each customer being able to optimise their electricity consumption to take advantage of time-of-day differential pricing, dynamically adjusted to reflect the power available at any moment (probably on 5 min intervals). In future they may also allow the retail utility to turn off or down certain customer appliances such as water heaters, clothes dryers, air conditioners and fridges to prevent supply voltage drops at time of peak load. Even more complexity is expected to follow the introduction of electric vehicles.
These meters will very likely utilise TCP/IP internet technology and the World Wide Web (WWW) for communications protocols and connection. As similar issues exist in respect of water and gas a future smart meter may incorporate the fibre termination in a dwelling as well as combining all the utility metering for the household. Depending on the 'granularity' or the information gathered there are already fears that the vast quantity of data generated will consume much of the future bandwidth.