Internet Of Things: Definition And Business Opportunities, Riyadh Chamber Of Commerce

This workshop was held in partnership with the Ministry of Commerce represented by the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce. The workshop was conducted in collaboration with Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the leading telecom operator in Saudi Arabia. The topic of the workshop was “Internet of Things: Definition and Business Opportunities,” presented by Dr. Abdullah Almuttiri, chair of ComSoc Saudi Chapter, and Eng. Othman Aldahash, VP in STCS. The event attracted about 80 attendees from industry and academia.

This event started with Dr. Abdullah, who gave an introduction discussing the fourth revolution that will transform human lives to a digitized life, followed by a walk through the mobile generations from the 1G to the current 4G features and how digital transformation evolved. This was followed by an introduction to 5G, with the features it will bring and the expected further transformation and digitization it will bring to humanity. Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything was then discovered and explained. The era of digitizing almost everything from small things to machine to machine communications was also explored.

With the 5G capabilities of low latency of less than 2ms and high capacity with 256QAM, carrier aggregation and massive MIMO are a key enabler of mobile IoT and IoE. Next was a discussion of Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) and their role in providing a sufficient connectivity for IoT. The presentation concluded with a discussion of the IoT and IoE ecosystem and the features and technologies intersecting with them, i.e. cloud computing and big data analytics, and their role in enabling smart IoT and smart IoE ecosystems. Following this presentation, Eng. Othman Aldahash discussed use cases of IoT and several existing IoT applications that STC is currently working on.