It is now very clear that one of the pillars of the 4th industrial evolution lies in wireless technologies to augment sensing and monitoring capabilities of IT systems that control machines in industry plants. Sensors and RFid tags distributed over machines can improve maintenance processes and make the production flow more efficient.
Many associate this revolution to 5G, since 5G will include IoT capabilities of unprecedented performance, in terms of latency and reliability. Nevertheless.
Nevertheless, 5G requires connection to the Internet. The IoT requires connection to the Internet. The recent war launched by the US Government towards Chinese network equipment manufacturers, emphasises privacy and cybersecurity threats and feed FEAR.
Companies are worried by privacy and cybersecurity threats much more than individuals. For this reason, many companies are wandering whether to rely on IoT technologies to improve their industrial plants.
However, IoT in many cases is not really needed. Equipping plants with sensors and tags, reading thei information and using it for maintenance and monitoring purposes, can be done without the need to involve the Internet; a local wireless (sensor) network can support the production process without the need to connect to the Internet the plant. IoT without Internet, what we are used to call WSN (wireless sensor network) technologies, which can be based on a number of wireless technologies that are becoming day-by-day more sophisticated. IoT or, NoT (Network of Things)?.