That is fair, though as a practical matter for connecting with moving things the tiny range of BLE makes it more or less useless. In terms of "most applications" you probably mean body area networks (e.g. FitBit) where it does indeed do well but beyond that, BLE is not a serious IoT option for "most applications".
Looking at the wireless protocols being deployed in nearly all cases, my vote would be no. We are installing junk wireless with junk security, some of which is just comical. I don't have all the answers, but there are a few straightforward improvements to be made that I outline here: https://medium.com/the-startup-magazine-collection/a-simple-...
When your wireless technology has an average outdoor range of 30-40 feet, of course spectrum is not an issue. When large numbers of endpoints (thousands or tens of thousands) share a common access point over many miles, it's a really significant issue that can be addressed in a number of ways outlined here http://bit.ly/1hExgtG
> Few big players seem to be making use of such a thing. They'd currently rather have their own walled gardens. :)
Even some of the small maker targeted ones. For awhile I was searching for a cheap wifi connected microcontroller for some hobbyist home automation stuff. Both the Electric Imp[1] and Particle/Spark[2] products looked great, but they seem to both have obligatory cloud integration. If I spend weeks building something for my home, It has to be able to work until the hardware dies.
Luckily, I found the ESP8266[3] has pretty much all the capabilities I want, no cloud required.
I covered this in a separate piece on low power wide area networks http://www.slideshare.net/haystacktech/the-iot-hunger-games-... though to be clear, we are not talking about high bandwidth like Ethernet. We are seeing good signal propagation in sub-1GHz bands (measured in miles) while preserving multi-year AA battery life with some newer PHY layer technologies like LoRa and others. 2.4GHz is a mosh pit that most serious IoT vendors are fleeing due to the high interference and the resulting RMA's and related costs. For sensor networks, there is rarely a good reason not to use one of the more popular sub-1GHz bands 433/868/915 regardless of your geographic location.
> 2.4GHz is a mosh pit that most serious IoT vendors are fleeing due to the high interference and the resulting RMA's and related costs.
Your sales hyperbole is drowning out the good points you have. Knock it down a notch.
2.4GHz is a mosh pit. However, nobody is going away from it precisely because you need it to bootstrap the network. Data is most useful when it hits the internet, and, for better or worse, the only cheap way of doing that is WiFi with the occasional side of Bluetooth Low Energy with an attached phone/tablet/etc (however, people get annoyed at the extra battery drain).
Now, if you convince Apple or Google to throw 433/868/915 chips into all their devices, then, yes, people will dump 2.4GHz like a hot potato.
"2.4GHz is a mosh pit. However, nobody is going away from it"
Nobody strikes me as hyperbole, really. You will see one of the two companies you mention embrace sub-1GHz in the next 6 months. Also LPWAN's are almost entirely driven by sub-1GHz now and the list of participating telco's are not nobodies.
It is a feature of using lower frequencies together with lower data rates and signal processing technologies. Consult with any RF engineer -- there is no magic here, just practical engineering to solve a particular set of problems.
