There have been many advancements in telecommunications over the years in Ontario, Canada, possibly none as significant as Alexander Graham Bell's first distant telephone transmission between Brantford, Ontario and Paris, Ontario in 1876.

That is until recently when a new Toronto-based company, BrainGrid Corporation proved a revolutionary new communications device named "Sentroller" in Fort Erie, Ontario, as part of a recent pilot program which has the potential to place the province back on top of the technology map. (Pictured below the Sentroller)

BrainGrid's "Sentroller" is an advanced solar energy monitoring technology platform that delivers a reliable and fully featured means to connect and relay wireless data.  So in essence anyone can easily to remotely monitor and manage systems and infield equipment previously deemed as “unmonitorable”.

Using a wireless internet gateway and software platform, it is able to connect "things" to the internet using a radio frequency, instead of conventional hard wired or cellular supported modems at a fraction of the cost. In other words, imagine connecting your device to the internet while reducing your monthly fee by more than 90%?  In a word...WOW.

(Pictured below, how Sentroller works)

This cost reducing technology is absolutely monumental because it opens the possibilities for a number of "things' to be connected to the internet that were once considered uneconomical to connect.

(Below pictured some of the many uses for the Sentroller)

But what exactly is the Internet of Things and where did it all begin? The term "Internet of Things" was coined in the late 1990s by entrepreneur Kevin Ashton in a 1999 presentation. Ashton, who's one of the founders of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, was part of a team that discovered how to link objects to the Internet through an RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tag.

(RFID) is the wireless use of electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for the purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects. The tags contain electronically stored information.

In our modern day world, IoT is the network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity, which enables these objects to collect and exchange data. This is expected to be the next big technology wave, bigger than cell phones and possibly even bigger than the internet itself.

By 2020 it is expected that over 50 billion such "things" and/or devices will be connected to the internet.

The idea of animating the inanimate, or compelling the physical world to do our bidding has been a staple of science fiction for half a century or more.  But this holds true no longer and the Sentroller is but one piece of proof that what was once fantasy is now becoming reality.

As Bell's telecommunications simplified communication for the world in 1876, so BrainGrid's new field proven Sentroller technology is positioned to simplify energy reform now and in the future.

The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of AltEnergyMag

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