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This week, we’re talking about the new way EVs are connecting to the grid, NTN satellite, secure boot, and more!

For years, the promise of vehicle-to-grid technology sounded like science fiction: cars sitting in driveways and parking lots, quietly discharging stored power back into the grid during a heat wave. The reality arriving now is quieter and more consequential. Utilities are treating EVs as one more resource in programs that already pay people for their thermostats and home batteries, and that shift — from novelty to plumbing — is what gets vehicle-to-grid out of pilot purgatory and into people's driveways.

Eversource and National Grid made the shift concrete this week, launching a Massachusetts pilot that lets residential customers enroll bidirectional-capable EVs in ConnectedSolutions, the utilities' existing program for tapping flexible energy resources during peak demand. Partners EnergyHub, Sunrun, and The Mobility House handle the technical work of dispatching and managing the vehicles. The real story is the door EVs are walking through: an established program, already trusted by regulators and already paying out incentives, rather than a bespoke initiative built from scratch. National Grid had already used the same door for electric school buses. Now individual drivers get access too.

That's a smaller leap than earlier discussions of V2G suggested, when the technology got framed as a conceptual overhaul of how electricity moves — cars recast as emergency backup power or as infrastructure in their own right. That framing assumed V2G needed the world to build something new around it. What's unfolding in Massachusetts is more modest and more achievable: the grid had already been reorganizing itself around flexible, distributed resources for other reasons, and EVs arrived in time to take a seat.

Utilities have spent years modernizing the grid to absorb solar panels, home batteries, and other distributed resources, building the monitoring and demand-response systems needed to balance a grid that no longer gets its power from a handful of predictable sources. That work built organizational and technical capacity to onboard a new kind of participant without reinventing the wheel each time. An EV battery on wheels fits into that system the same way a home battery already does.

For anyone working in IoT, the takeaway is about sequencing. The fastest way to bring a new class of device into a mature, regulated industry is to make it legible to systems that already exist and already have the industry's trust, rather than building a parallel track from scratch. Vehicle-to-grid took off in Massachusetts because the grid had already organized itself to let a new kind of participant in — the cars just had to walk through the door.

The cost of a connectivity failure isn’t the megabytes that didn’t move. It’s everything that happens because they didn’t. None of those costs show up on the connectivity invoice. All of them show up somewhere. And that’s one of the strange economics of fleet connectivity: the connectivity line item can stay green while the operational cost of connectivity failure keeps climbing.

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Voice is becoming the preferred interface for connected hardware — and most teams are discovering that the hard part isn’t the model; it’s everything around it. Orchestrating your voice AI pipeline — from the time your user speaks, the words are transcribed, an LLM decides how to respond, and the reply comes back as natural speech — connectivity, silicon: up to five vendors, five integration projects, and a product that still degrades the moment the network does.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Wienke Giezeman, CEO and co-founder of The Things Industries, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss how IoT is finally delivering what it promised ten years ago. The conversation covers what changed technically and commercially, the ROI of IoT, why deployments failed in the early days, criticism of IoT, what companies still get wrong about LoRaWAN, and The Things Conference 2026.

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