Recently a Cisco official was quoted as saying that the Smart Grid will be 1,000 times as large as the Internet. That quote, says the Cisco official, was inaccurate --- but she has plenty of good reasons why the Smart Grid will dwarf the Internet.
Marie Hattar, vice president of marketing in Cisco's Network Systems Solutions group, told me that her quote about the Smart Grid eventually growing to be 1,000 times the size of the Internet was not true. However, she added that there is plenty of reason to believe that the Smart Grid will still dwarf the Internet, even if it won't be 1,000 times as large.
"It has the potential to be larger than the Internet because most people have electricity, but not everyone has Internet access," she explains.
Hattar says that eventually most homes will have devices with intelligent sensors that track power use, and that will be able to be controlled via the grid. So each home will have multiple intelligent devices connected to the grid.
At the moment, there's no clear standard for communicating over the Smart Grid, but Hattar believes that the Internet Protocol (IP) will eventually win out because it's been tested over decades, and is scalable and extensible. She says that IPv6 may be the ideal solution, because of the security built into that new generation of IP, and also because of its much larger namespace than the existing version of IP.
Hattar envisions the Smart Grid extending directly into the home, and homes having not just intelligent devices, but routers and other devices for controlling home energy use. Cisco, she says, plans to be a player in virtually every aspect of the Smart Grid, including the communications fabric as well as home devices.
There have been many claims over the years that home appliances will become attached to networks --- in the early days of Microsoft Bill Gates was making that claim. So far, it hasn't happened.
But Hattar has good reasons to believe that this time is different. There are now many very inexpensive, high-performing wireless sensors that can embedded at very little cost into consumer appliances. It's only a matter of time before that starts to happen -- and she points to a number of pilot projects where it is happening already.
If you're looking for more details about Cisco's plans for the Smart Grid,
check out its Smart Grid Solutions page.
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