We're filling buildings with technology from the 80s

– Would you buy a car that looked futuristic but was full of 1980s technology on the inside? Most people would probably say no, but when it comes to buildings, many people actually say yes.

Ford Sierra, Opel Kadett and Volvo 240.

Beloved cars from the 80s, which were among the better vehicles on four wheels at the time. In 2022, new models and new car brands have taken over, and few would call any of those three car models a forward-looking choice.

Unfortunately, for many of the buildings we renovate – and even build – in 2022, the situation is completely different. On the outside they look like 2022, but parts of the technical innards come from the 80s. It's like driving a Tesla with the insides of a Volvo 240. The experience isn't quite the same.

I raised exactly this point in 2020. I called for a radical change, but at the same time I was myself helping to drag the industry in the wrong direction. I was contributing to the continued use of outdated technology, without really being aware of it myself.

A few years earlier I had teamed up with one of the country's largest property players and fronted a massive technology project. The ambition was that all of the company's buildings would be integrated and share one unified top-level system for controlling and monitoring all technical systems.

During the project we concluded that we needed to standardise the control systems with a common protocol. Previously it had been common to have several different systems, and LON, Modbus and KNX were just some of the solutions in use. Different systems made reuse and taking over a facility challenging.

In this project we were therefore going to be forward-thinking and go for a common standard for building automation. The choice fell on BACnet, a communication protocol for "Building Automation and Control Network". We felt we were ahead of the curve and convinced that this couldn't go wrong.

Already early in the project, however, challenges began to emerge.

For example, data that was supposed to pass through the routers wouldn't work properly. To solve this we had to add a control unit with a BBMD function, namely a BACnet Broadcast Management Device. But this didn't work optimally either. Perhaps the best analogy for this function can be found in the TV series The Office.

One of the office employees, Dwight Schrute, likes to repeat all messages that the boss says. The same is true of the BBMD function. Every time something is supposed to happen, the BBMD repeats the message. From an IT perspective this is madness, and chaos was therefore inevitable. At the same time the protocol had no form of built-in security solution.

Gradually a suspicion crept in that we might have gone wrong from the very beginning. New property technology had made its entrance and I began to ask myself: why should this technology actually be forced to communicate on a platform from the 80s? Was it because it was best at data management? Was it because it was forward-looking and designed for sending data to the cloud? Was it optimised for sending as much data as possible, in as small a size as possible, over 5G?

The answer was no to all these questions.

The growing suspicion grew ever stronger, and the answer eventually became obvious. Choosing BACnet as a common communication protocol was a colossal mistake. The explanation was actually clear. The entire protocol was developed in the 80s, long before the internet, IP and routers, and was therefore not developed with modern technology and solutions in mind. Yes, updates have been released along the way, but it's a bit like making soup from the same nail. It's never going to be gourmet.

In recent years I have therefore become more and more convinced that we need to move on. BACnet must be scrapped in favour of far better solutions. While the established players sleep through the lesson, the development of new property technology (proptech) has really gathered pace. BACnet and other protocols developed in the 80s are facing their Kodak Moment, and will find themselves replaced by modern solutions that are both better and cheaper.

BACnet is not dying because there is a slightly better protocol, or because the solution lacks a good security fix. The overriding problem with the communication protocol is that it has been overtaken. APIs and MQTT have simply taken over. The new technology answers yes to all the questions I asked myself earlier in this text. Yes, new technology is best at data management. Yes, it is forward-looking, and yes, it is optimised for data and cloud solutions. Closed protocols like BACnet will therefore die out.

We must therefore stop equipping our buildings with fossil technology from the 80s. We would of course not accept 80s technology in the cars we drive – let us not accept it in our buildings either.

We must therefore stop equipping our buildings with fossil technology from the 80s. We would of course not accept 80s technology in the cars we drive – let us not accept it in our buildings either.

‍