Are telcos' customers expecting too much of IoT connectivity techs?

Re: So who are these "customers" of which he speaks?

It is always been business. You got it right John, "Internet of Trash".

One thing that struck me at the conference was that almost everyone (apart from operators) was discussing how to do this without incumbent operators. Reasons given ranged from cost (predictably), uncertainty (if one signs a contract today, will the operator guarantee no price hikes once customers tied in too tightly to leave), and uncertainty in another form - partially triggered by a US view of network switch-offs, but also a more general topic: what happens if a multiyear NB-IoT thing deployed now, but in two years time your operator decides LTE-M will be the focus - what stops them simply discontinuing services two years after that, when you've got devices out there with six years left on a customer contract? Non-operator types were saying it's all very well operators saying use their services as more secure, better QoS etc., but unless they're also guaranteeing services for lifetime of thing, they are not providing another thing people need.

There were multiple side discussions about security, and acknowledged by almost everyone that it's not taken seriously enough by many current deployments - and also that trusting a single particular technology (be it NB-IOT, LTE, or the unlicensed options) to provide end-to-end security is not enough. It also seemed clear that many prospective customers don't actually care about it either - not just "bells and whistles" too expensive when a cheaper, less secure option might be "good enough", but if the "no added security" option is cheaper still, that could well be their choice. What would have been useful, however, is a side-by-side technology comparison, by a security expert (not a vendor/operator): at other industry conferences I've been to recently its not unusal to see the event organiser get academics to provide a non-commercial review of differing approaches, it can't be the case that there are no researchers in this field, surely?