I remember a time when I was driving my granddad’s car for the first time. It was Fiat 124 and there was a fuel control lever. In our days it’s hard to imagine that fuel control could be done manually by a driver in modern cars. All the cars are equipped with more pieces of electronics than the firs space ship had.
Since that times meaning of the word “automobile” has changed. It’s hard to explain to buyers that a device with manual fuel control lever is an automobile. Most of consumers expect it to be managed automatically.
And the same thing happens to our houses now. There are many thing in a house to be managed: heating, lightning, security, meters etc. How nice will it be when it will become possible to forget about all this drudgery and just enjoy leaving in your modern house!
In many situations it does not make sense to make such a house autonomous. For sample, reporting meter data requires them to be connected to a network somehow. And the problem is that Internet (in the form we know it today) was designed for personal computers. And automated house could have much more devices than number of it’s inhabitants. And there is not just houses, but also there are offices, shops, clubs, filling stations, etc.
They can not be autonomous in many cases, they are connected to a cloud through Internet. And Internet of things (IoT) means A new, IPv6 based Internet, which supports much higher number of connected devices, and devices are managed not by human beings, but by a cloud.