" the technology is primarily there to make money for network operators."
That's the best description of IoT I have read so far...
Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is the IoT networking technology most favoured by big telcos. Softbank tried demonstrating it today at Huawei's Global Mobile Broadband Forum – and it didn't go to plan. Today has seen the first November snow in Tokyo for 54 years. Although the BBC was able to predict this last week with …
I realise the real topic is the technology, not the car park, but really, a car park map showing free bays? It's amazing how many people seriously struggle with maps and they mostly have significant features for people to orient themselves from, not a blank uniform grid like a carpark. So to make it practical you'd need it to give driving instructions which then means the car needs to know where it is, even in an underground carpark, so layer on yet more technology. Personally I find a simple red/green light above the bay extremely effective. Sometimes, and this is far from the only example, because we can is not reason enough.
A bit of a digression off the main topic but I would find an empty space app very useful in many of the car parks which charge (via ANPR identification) from the moment you pass the entry barrier rather than from when you actually park and buy a ticket. At Heathrow last week ended up overstaying the 1st half hour rate by about 5 minutes and it cost me an additional £4 or so.... The 5 minutes being roughly the same time as it took to find an empty space in the short term car park from entering the place.
I mean NB-IOT would be ideally suited for e-mail as the communications standard between the provider and the end user. Since we are often talking about _really_ low bitrates (<1000bps), transmitting a datagram takes quite some time anyhow.
E-Mail is fast, typically an e-mail will arive withing the second. However it's also resillient against errors. If your mailserver is down for a couple of hours you will not miss a single e-mail.