I should come up with a snappy name for this prediction:  Doorbells will be cell phones.  What I mean by this is that lots of the very very  simplest  signalling devices, push buttons, switches, etc. etc. are going to work via the cell phone network.  Devices which do not need any of the obvious features of the cell network: mobility, great distance, high bandwidth.  But rather devices that could be hardwired over short distances.  It’s a race between unlicensed standards based open access solutions and the cell phone companies.  If the cell phone companies can offer services to device makers at attractive price points fast enough then they win.

This article shows that at least one cell phone company appears to begin understand this.  Pill boxes – that’s the idea.

I’ll pile on to my guess.  I suspect that the early movers in this direction will get caught at price points that are way too high; and that later movers will be the ones to garner the real volume applications.  What would really blow the market open would be a onetime payment, probably a dollar, which would grant the device maker a tiny bit of bandwidth per month (say a Megabyte/year) in  perpetuity  tied to a single device.  Or how about a kbyte total for the life of the device, for cereal boxes tops.

This is the complement to the insight that WIFI is now table stakes for a cell phone.  What I’m predicting is that minimal cellular service could be table stakes for pretty much any electronic device.  Isn’t “table stakes” an amusing way to say must-have?  Stuff moves onto that list for assorted reasons.

No matter what a lot more signals are going to round trip deep into the cloud.