Characteristics of successful big data solutions

The reality is that many IT professionals are just beginning to grapple with just how big Big Data really is, and what it’s going to mean for their business. They may not be sure exactly how they’re going to solve this problem yet, but they’re starting to get a sense of what those solutions will entail:

1. A more scalable, “burstable” cloud network platform that’s capable of storing, managing, and securing all this data in an efficient manner (Enterprises can’t plan on running back to EMC every day to buy more storage; and they certainly don’t want to be these guys.

2. New cloud and mobile capabilities that will allow them to access that data anywhere, anytime, on any device.

3. More intelligent tools to understand the avalanche of data they’re receiving – what to keep, what to discard, what must be retained for compliance purposes, what can be archived in the cloud, etc.

4. New analytics capabilities that can take them beyond data collection (which is often the easy part) and help them really understand and respond to the information they’re receiving, and ultimately predict future trends.

It’s a lot to accomplish, but enterprises have no choice but to get started. After all, preparing for the data deluge will likely mean the difference between swimming in information—and drowning in it.

We can expect a 32 percent growth rate in wireless M2M connections over the next three years and 40 billion connected M2M devices by 2020—all of them continually plugging away, collecting information, sending it back home. And it’s more than just sheer numbers of devices. The way we use those devices is also evolving and generating exponentially more data—and more complex data—than ever before.

Consider an electrical utility company that monitors a million meters. The utility used to gather one data point per month; now they may poll those devices every 15 minutes. Similarly, enterprises tracking a vehicle fleet used to note each vehicle’s departure and arrival times. Now, they maintain real-time information about the location of every vehicle, as well as a dozen other metrics tracking performance, fuel-efficiency, road conditions and more.

Shifting currents

We’re also beginning to see a major shift in the way M2M solutions can work. Previously, almost all connectivity was based on one-to-one connections, i.e., one sensor,  collecting some type of data and sending it back to a data center. But we are beginning to see far more one-to-many and even any-to-any connections, as M2M devices begin communicating with each other and creating networks of networks. Think of a smart meter that’s no longer simply monitoring whole-home energy usage, but also communicating with a dozen appliances and electronic devices in the home to track their consumption patterns. Or imagine a future where your car doesn’t just report on traffic and road conditions to OnStar or Google, but communicates with every other car on the road, in real time.

You don’t have to be a mathematician to realize that when you’ve got more connected devices out in the field, when you’re polling those devices hundreds or thousands of times more frequently than you once did, and when many of those devices are now talking to each other as well as to you, you’re going to have a lot of data.

An unbelievably HUGE amount of data, in fact. And a pretty serious business problem.

Batten down the hatches

So what does all this mean for you? Well, if you’re in position to manage, secure, access, and analyze all that data, it means a major competitive advantage. But how many enterprises are really there right now? And, as that data set continues to grow—and demand for mobile and cloud access to that information grows alongside it—how many businesses are really prepared to keep pace? Most of the businesses we talk with using M2M technology are already overwhelmed with the data they’re getting right now.

How is your business handling the influx of data from a myriad of internal and public sources? Have you found ways to leverage this data to improve performance?

Of course, nobody would invest that kind of energy – it just doesn’t make sense when your oven does such an efficient job. But believe it or not, a lot of companies do exactly that when building machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. When they want to deploy fleet management, asset tracking, telematics, mobile health monitoring, and other connected applications, they use the same legacy software tools they’ve used for years for their other enterprise applications.

This approach can work – you can build solutions that do collect data from your trucks, vending machines, medical equipment, shipping containers, industrial control systems, etc. But building applications this way is extremely costly, takes a very long time, and often results in solutions that are inflexible and difficult to scale. After all, designing an application that monitors a few dozen devices on a factory floor is a very different problem than designing one that can receive data from thousands or tens of thousands of devices in real time and translate that data into useful information.

You can use legacy enterprise software tools to try to solve that problem, and many companies do. But the process is likely to be long and painful, and require an extensive new coding effort. And, if the tools you’re using weren’t designed for M2M, there’s a good chance something will be overlooked, which means your development cycle will involve a lot of time-consuming (and expensive) trial and error.

Fortunately, companies no longer have to go the “DIY” route. They can take advantage of a wide range of development tools and software platforms designed specifically for connected devices. These M2M tools are built to meet the unique scalability, flexibility, and analytics requirements of connected applications, and to help companies build and implement those applications much more quickly. So in a lot less time, with a lot less sweat and headaches, you can have your cake. And eat it too.

Can you think of things in your life that aren’t connected today, but should be?  Or things that aren’t connected today and should never be?

It might be shocking to know that you likely have vampires in your home and business right now!  Instead of sucking blood, they are sucking electricity, though.  But they don’t look like the fanged creatures depicted in the movies…walk into a dark room…virtually any room in your home or office…and look around at all the tiny red, blue, green and yellow lights that are on or pulsating…  these are the vampires! The phone charger that you leave in the wall after you remove your phone from it;  the guest bedroom TV set and satellite/cable box that are on though you rarely have guests; the laptop charger plugged into the wall night after night with no laptop attached …or the fully charged phone that is still plugged into the charger.  This includes virtually anything that is turned off or fully charged, but still plugged into a power receptacle.

In your business, think about how many outlets are draining power at night and weekends when most people aren’t there.  This can add a lot of unneeded —- and unnecessary — costs taking away from the bottom line.

I can see that some of you are rolling your eyes…you have other things to be concerned with.  Shocking as it is, vampire power has been estimated to cost you around $175 per year, and emit about 2,000 pounds of CO2.

A study by AT&T when it launched its Zero Charger for cell phones in 2010 determined that if 80% of U.S. wireless subscribers used a charger that automatically disconnected the current when a cell phone was fully charged or when it was unplugged from the charger, enough electricity to power 24,000 homes for a year would be saved! * The savings for your business can be even more.  Many businesses are embracing this option, not just to help the environment, but to save costs and improve the bottom line in this tough economy.

So no stakes or any other kind of violence is needed to kill these vampires.  Just take one, two, or three simple steps:

(1)   Unplug all chargers when not in use

(2)   Unplug other “standby” devices when not in use for long periods, such as the cable box and TV in the guest bedroom

(3)   Buy smart power strips that will provide energy-conserving automatic control of your plugged-in devices for you.

With a combination of all three, you will remove the vampires from your home or business!

Have you used any of these smart power strips?  We’d love to hear your experiences.  Please leave your comments below.

*Calculation based on an active subscriber base of 220 million with plugged in chargers. Total US cell phone subscriber base is 277 million. Total standby electricity waste estimated: 273 million kwh. Electricity consumption data from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (DOE). Method of calculation from US Energy Information Administration. Standby Power Summary Table – http://standby.lbl.gov/summary- table.html, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Formula for estimating energy consumption Energy Savers: Estimating Appliance and Home Electronic Energy Use,  http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/appliances/index.cfm/mytopic =10040, US Department of Energy

In a lot of ways, this made sense: utilities are obviously concerned about maintaining the security and reliability of communications affecting critical infrastructure, and have been hesitant to entrust that to a third party. And it’s not like utilities have no experience building and maintaining infrastructure, right?

Well, kind of. While some maintenance aspects do translate from the world of energy transmission and distribution to communications, the reality is that a modern IP communication network is a vastly different animal. And, while utilities may like the idea of end-to-end control over both energy transmission and Smart Grid communications, for many utilities, it just doesn’t make economic sense any longer.

For this reason, the industry is seeing more and more utilities collaborate with third-party mobile network operators (MNOs) to host their Smart Grid communications. Indeed, this shift is becoming so significant, some in the industry refer to this evolution as “Smart Grid 2.0.”

So what exactly is driving this transition? ABI Research recently explored this question in a new paper, “The Evolution of Smart Grid 1.0 to 2.0.” Here are three prime factors driving the shift to Smart Grid 2.0:

1. Focusing on Core Competency

The biggest reason utilities are looking to “outsource” Smart Grid communications to MNOs is also the most straightforward: communications are just not a utility’s core competency. Can a utility build that competency? Of course. Along the same lines, an automobile company could build up the infrastructure necessary to manufacture its own tires. But why? Why invest the time, manpower, and dollars to recreate something yourself, when you can purchase a mature product from a vendor that focuses exclusively on providing it?

For a utility building out the Smart Grid, global MNOs can offer deep expertise and many years experience in secure wireless communications. And, every dollar a utility saves by not building and operating communications infrastructure is a dollar that can be invested in smarter energy infrastructure.

2. Falling Costs

Even when utilities considered offloading communication services in the past, the costs were often high enough that the value proposition wasn’t compelling. But that’s changed a lot over the last several years, largely due to a maturing cellular industry.

As cellular technology has matured, it has come down significantly in cost. (Where an embedded GPRS cellular module cost approximately $30 a few years ago, today they cost roughly half that.) But the industry itself has also changed as MNOs have launched lower-cost rate plans for machine-to-machine (M2M) cellular connectivity, and begun to target and compete for utilities’ Smart Grid business.

Today, utilities can connect Smart Meters for around 50 cents per meter per month. ABI Research argues that with the current state of cellular technology and services, the deployment and ongoing operational costs of a hosted solution are substantially lower than owning and operating a private communications infrastructure.

3. Greater Trust

Just as important as these factors, the degree of confidence that utilities have in MNOs has also changed over the last several years. As the cellular industry continues to grow, utilities have begun to recognize the substantial investment that MNOs have made, not just in their communications networks, but in assuring the security and reliability of those networks. Today, many utilities recognize that a Smart Grid communication network hosted by an MNO is just as safe and reliable as one owned by the utility, if not more so.

Expect these trends to continue. As the cost of cellular technologies and services continue to decline, and cellular Smart Grid offerings continue to mature, the economics of collaboration rather than ownership have become too compelling to ignore.

What are your experiences?  What have you experienced regarding Smart Grid communication networks?  Please share your thoughts/observations.  We look forward to your comments.

Moving to the Cloud

Service providers like AT&T have been early entrants in cloud storage services, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and other cloud solutions that let customers “pay by the drink,” as we say, or pay for just those IT services they use, rather than building out full-blown data center services themselves. Just a couple years ago, utility executives I spoke with were skeptical of these kinds of services. A common refrain was, “Cloud storage, maybe, but we would never host applications in the cloud.” Today, that perception is changing.

Partly, this shift results from people simply growing more comfortable with the idea of cloud services. After all, when utilities now commonly host their human resources applications in the cloud, or their payroll services in the cloud, it’s hard to argue that cloud services are inherently impractical or unsecure. Fundamentally, however, I suspect the warming attitudes toward the cloud stem from a reaffirmation within utilities of their core competencies and business models. Given the choice, investor-owned utilities would prefer to direct their efforts toward providing reliable electricity at an affordable cost—rather than building and maintaining vast server farms.

As the Smart Grid evolves, however, a utility’s data center requirements grow exponentially. Consider: Many utilities deploying smart meters go from one meter read per month to as many as 96 reads per day, per meter. A daily meter reading may only represent a few kilobytes, but multiply that by millions of meters, and you’re suddenly talking about a vast amount of data. Do utilities really want to be responsible for that data, and for investing in the massive data center upgrades necessary to store and protect it? Or does it make more sense to use cloud-based services, and pay only for the data center resources they need?

Peering Deeper into the Data future will encompass distributed micro-generation from solar panels, electric vehicles, and more, creating far more complex (and often competing) power requirements. To successfully manage that grid, utilities will need a much deeper understanding of consumption behavior—and a far more extensive data analytics capability than they have today.

If there is one thing we hear constantly from utilities, it’s that they are behind in this area. Many in the industry report that even when smart meters are deployed and providing huge amounts of information, much of the data is never mined or evaluated. And today’s smart metering projects are still in their infancy. How much more data will utilities have to contend with over the next five years?

Major telecommunication carriers like AT&T already have analytics infrastructures in place to accommodate massive amounts of data. This should make sense; AT&T alone sees more than 27 Petabytes of data traverse its global network on an average business day. It’s the ability to perform sophisticated analytics on enormous, dynamic data sets that allows telecoms to plan for changing capacity requirements, pinpoint infrastructure vulnerabilities, predict when network attacks are likely to occur, and more. And it’s exactly that kind of analysis that will be needed to enable intelligent Smart Grid distribution and capacity planning.

This kind of analysis, however, is not something the average IT department can simply pick up and add to its responsibilities. It requires highly specialized tools and expertise. At AT&T, most of these capabilities come from AT&T Labs, where they are developed by PhD scientists with decades of experience in data analytics.

Securing the Grid

Along the same lines, telecom providers can also offer valuable security expertise. As utilities contend with a dizzying list of federal, state, and internal security requirements, they once again face a question of core competency: Should they invest in developing state-of-the-art IT security organizations internally? Or, should they outsource those tasks to organizations with proven expertise in this space?

Telecom providers are a natural choice for managed IT security and security consulting, having already invested significant resources into building out security practices to protect their own global communication networks. Telecoms observe malware evolving every day, and have developed the infrastructure necessary to detect it, classify it, and predict trends in malicious activity—expertise that would take utilities many years and significant investment to develop on their own. For these reasons, many utilities are now looking to telecom providers for everything from managing the security of Smart Grid communications, to helping achieve NERC CIP certification, to running a security operations center.

These are just a few of the ways that telecoms can support the growing IT needs of utilities. Energy suppliers are already relying on telecom providers for Smart Grid communications. It may be time to take a closer look at what else they have to offer.

How do you feel telecoms can support the IT needs of utilities?  What do you see that is working now?  What needs to be changed for the future?  Your insights will be most appreciated by your fellow readers.

We should realize, however, that apart from these loftier goals, the Smart Grid also holds the potential to deliver major savings right away, just by providing more visibility into the grid.

A 2005 study conducted for the Department of Energy estimated that outages cost U.S. consumers and businesses about $80 billion annually. Of course, some outages simply can’t be prevented; a major storm or natural disaster will bring down portions of the grid whether they are sensored or not. But the report notes that, of those lost dollars, two thirds—$52 billion—result from momentary power interruptions of a few minutes or less. It’s in these smaller-scale outages where Smart Grid technology can make a real difference.

Lack of Visibility = Higher Costs

Consider capacitor banks. Faults in capacitor banks can and do cause outages, but most utilities inspect capacitor banks just once or twice a year. By outfitting capacitor banks with monitors, utilities could get bi-weekly reports about voltage readings, heat readings, and other metrics, as well as real-time alarms if something goes severely out of tolerance. Ultimately, they could be much more proactive about identifying and correcting problems before they cause an outage.

Line faults are another area ripe for Smart Grid optimization. Today, most utilities rely on electromechanical fault detectors on individual lines, typically a ball that rotates from black to red in the event of a fault. But most utilities have no centralized mechanism to know when and where a detector has flipped. So, isolating a line fault means sending someone out to drive around and check all the fault detectors. (And if it’s night time, it means driving around with a flashlight!)

If that sounds like searching for a needle in a haystack, it often is. In many cases, the utility simply can’t determine where the fault has occurred—until that fault eventually becomes an outage.

Now, imagine a world where all line detectors communicate with a utility’s operations center. Utilities can regularly ping all fault detectors to check their status,  and any fault triggers an alert, allowing the utility to immediately pinpoint the problem.

This kind of Smart Grid innovation may seem relatively mundane. But, considering there is, on average, one fault detector for every thousand meters, it can make a huge difference in a utility’s ability to prevent outages.

Expanding Intelligence

While preventing short-duration outages would most benefit business and industry, Smart Grid communications would also help ordinary residential customers. Today, most people believe that if their power goes out, the utility is probably already aware of it. Well, the industry may not like to advertise this fact, but most of the time they’re not.

With little or no real-time intelligence about the grid, utilities often have no idea how big an outage is or how many people it affects. In a grid equipped with smart meters, however, they do. Even that basic level of intelligence—where an outage is occurring, how many meters are affected—will make a world of difference. Utilities will be able to better understand the nature of any problem and marshal the right resources to quickly correct it.

So next time you hear about how much Smart Grid technology will cost, remember: there’s another side of the ledger, and Smart Grid savings are likely to be substantial.

What do you think?  What do you see as the cost advantages of the Smart Grid?  We look forward to your comments.

So what’s happening here? Is the Smart Grid one of those ideas that sounds great in theory but is doomed to fail in practice?

The short answer is absolutely not. Several factors have contributed to slower-than-expected growth in Smart Grid technologies. But ultimately, the reality is that the Smart Grid represents a profound change in the way people do things, and it’s just not going to happen overnight.

Regulatory Issues

Believe it or not, one of the biggest culprits in stagnating Smart Grid investment has been the Smart Grid grant awards created under the 2009 stimulus package. While this funding was intended to spur new investment, in practice it often had the opposite effect.

Once the possibility of billions of dollars in federal funding presented itself, all independent Smart Grid investment effectively screeched to a halt while businesses and utilities rushed to apply for funding. Additionally, it has not always been clear what strings would be attached to federal money (for example, whether utilities would be held to mandatory baselines for renewable energy sources). The end result was that many Smart Grid projects languished while these details were hammered out.

Lack of Urgency

Another factor in slow Smart Grid implementation has been the lack of a driving need to bring these solutions online. In some markets, especially developing regions in China, Smart Grid rollouts are proceeding at about the rate analysts expected. Why? Because there is a pressing need for a modern energy grid in these regions, and it just makes sense to build it with Smart Grid intelligence.

Here in the United States, we are in some ways victims of our own success. While Smart Grid intelligence may be necessary to meet long-term consumption needs, right now most of the country is reasonably well served by existing infrastructure. It doesn’t take six months here to run power to a new business. We can reasonably expect that when we plug something into an outlet, power will be available. So the urgency just isn’t there.

Evolutionary Change

The biggest factor in slow Smart Grid growth, however, is simply the scale of the change it represents.

Consider the idea of the “paperless office,” first envisioned in a 1975 article in BusinessWeek by George E. Pake, then head of a Xerox think tank:

“I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,” he says. “I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”

The vision was prescient, but the timing was off. Pake predicted most offices would be paperless by 1995. In fact, in the 90s localized printers actually led to more paper. It wasn’t until the last decade, when network and digital technologies reached full maturity, that the paperless office became a reality for the average business.

Like the paperless office, the Smart Grid is not just a good idea, it’s inevitable. The benefits are simply too great to ignore. But getting there will require major changes, not just in infrastructure but in the fundamental ways we think about power consumption. This will be a cultural change, possibly a generational one, and it’s just going to take some time.

What do you think?  Do you see the Smart Grid taking off?  What cultural changes do you believe need to take place for it to be fully embraced?  We look forward to hearing your ideas.

In case you are wondering what a “smart grid” is versus a “dumb grid”—or maybe what a “grid” is, I’ll digress.  For the most part, utilities do not know a lot about what goes on with the transmission and distribution lines until the inevitable happens—a power outage.  Even then, the utilities often do not know there is an outage until their customers call in (ergo the term “dumb grid).

With the implementation of a “smart grid” there will be many points on the grid—and this is key—with two-way communications.  These two-way communications  sensor, monitor, or measure electricity and can send and receive information to utilities about the grid’s performance.

So, back to standards.  Have you ever tried to hook up a home entertainment system, or perhaps add some components to an existing system?  Consumer electronics is a fairly mature market with a lot of standards that affect everything from the components inside (circuit boards for example) to the ports or plug-ins on the outside.  However, even in such a mature market, companies like Geek Squad thrive due to variations in equipment interfaces and the knowledge required to work around them.

So imagine trying to connect millions of electric meters into the smart grid, from many different vendors, along with hundreds of thousands of substation monitors, line sensors, load controllers and on and on.  Then consider the attempt to make it all work together seamlessly with minimal standards.  It won’t work and we will end up with the mish-mash that we have now.  This requires customers to call in and report outages instead of the utility knowing it immediately.   It increases the likelihood of outages due to the lack of knowledge of what is happening with the grid. Sensors and  Standards ARE important, even criticalto the success of a nationwide smart grid.

Standards are critical to achieve the interoperability that is crucial to a truly seamless “smart grid.” They are also crucial to enable utilities to work with third party developers, device makers, cell phone companies and Internet companies.  These players all help to create applications that are actually compelling for homeowners and renters to manage their electric consumption.

Consumers want to manage the energy consumption of major appliances, and will expect that those appliances can send a message if something needs attended to (a filter needs changed, the freezer is starting to fail). Without standards, the ability to do this will be hit or miss.

Even with standards, technology presents frustrating and time-consuming challenges.  To build a truly interoperable “smart grid” standards are a must.  Imagine learning a home energy management system in Texas, and moving to Georgia to be faced with something totally different—something that your smart appliances can no longer communicate with, etc. etc.  Imagine owning an electric vehicle and having to worry about whether the charging station at the mall has the right kind of plug?  Standards will play a big role here.

So do we need standards for the smart grid?  What are you thoughts on that.  What suggestions do you have for the best standards for the electric grid?  We look forward to hearing from you and getting your opinion on this important topic.

For decades the local utility entities have walked by our meters and taken monthly readings.  It’s doubtful that anyone worried or cared about what the utility actually did with that data.

What if the meter reader dropped his clipboard and it was found by someone not employed at the utility? What could they glean from the meter readings on that clipboard? Nothing whatsoever.

What You Don’t Want Others To Know About Your Utility Bill

But with the implementation of smart meters, where utilities can take 15-minute interval readings from your meter, the data become more telling. With unauthorized access to your smart meter data, it could be determined when you are not home, making a burglar’s life much easier.   A law enforcement agency could have the ability to determine you might be growing something illegal in your basement, based on your electricity usage.

Some states are looking at passing their own smart grid privacy legislation.  Various entities of the federal government are looking into smart grid privacy legislation.  There are numerous trade and standards organizations reviewing the need for smart grid privacy regulation.   Just google “smart meter data privacy” or similar terminology and you will be bombarded with an abundance of results.

Health Care and Telecommunications

The utility industry isn’t the first industry to face the need for an increasing amount of customer data privacy.  Think about the healthcare industry and the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in which the HIPAA Privacy Rule provides federal protections for personal health information held by covered entities and gives patients an array of rights with respect to that information¹.

Telecommunications carriers are governed by the Federal Communications Commission(FCC) rules protecting Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI).  This regulates the privacy of information that telecommunications services such as local, long distance, and wireless telephone companies acquire about their subscribers. It includes not only what services they use but their amount and type of usage  of individual customers. ²

Financial Institutions and Your Privacy

For organizations that handle credit, debit, prepaid, and ATM cards, however, there is a different privacy/security model, and that is one that was established by the industry itself.  While PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance is arguably more security focused than privacy focused, and was designed to minimize the risk of the card industry.  A number of major breeches into this industry are often in the news, so one does have to wonder how well this model is working.  The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act mandates that all financial institutions establish appropriate security standards to protect customer data from internal and external threats and unauthorized access.

AT&T is well positioned to assist utilities with increasing concerns around the privacy of their customer information.  Just a few examples include Regulatory Assessments Compliance, AT&T Web Application Firewall Service and SureScan from the AT&T Consulting portfolio.

Consumer Proprietary Network Information concerns what telecommunications companies know about you.  Click here to find out what information about you is contained.

Fundamentally, the electric grid system delivers electricity from points of generation to consumers. This grid system both transmits and distributes energy. Adding two-way communications between consumers and utilities transforms the traditional electric grid into a smart grid. This machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, which takes place via devices such as sensors and smartphones, gives utilities and consumers access to real-time, actionable information that positively affects how energy is consumed and delivered.

Here are eight ways telecommunication companies enable the smart grid:

1. Provide a private communications backbone for carrying sensor data.
2. Enablesecure two-way communication between consumers and utilities.
3. Work with various standards boards, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and manufacturer organizations to help create a reliable, secure, and inter-operable network environment for the smart grid, one that emphasizes decisions based on solid science.  All parts of the grid need to communicate and this requires standards.
4. Manage the uptick in data generated by a smart grid, including itemizing data sent to the consumer.  As smart grids proliferate, electric bills will resemble today’s telephone bill.
5. Facilitate necessary M2M communication in the home, where a smart meter will enable a two-way exchange of both information and energy (in the case of homes that generate or store energy), essentially turning the home into a node on the electric grid.
6. Create a home area network (HAN) for the smart meter to communicate with smart appliances capable of reporting usage data and responding to commands. While Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other emerging technologies are possibilities, AT&T Research is focusing on ZigBee, an emerging standard designed to efficiently transport small amounts of data, such as the temperature of a refrigerator or of a room, from the home to the utility.
7. Continue to research how the smart grid will interact with other home systems such as security, entertainment networks, home automation, and tele-health devices, all of which may compete for control.
8. Simulate a home environment where multiple systems play together, and test the interactions under a variety of conditions. Better understanding of how these systems inter-operate will lead to more informed decisions.

What else can telecoms do for smart grids? Share your thoughts.