According to the latest updated report on the mobility of the Swedish equipment manufacturer Ericsson, the number of objects connected to the IoT (connected cars, industrial machines, meters, sensors, consumer products of types wearables, etc.) should grow on average 19% worldwide by 2023, to reach a total of 20 billion units.
By that time, all devices connected to a network (including mobile phones, PCs, tablets) will reach 30 billion units.
Ericsson distinguishes objects that will be connected by short-range wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, etc.) from those connected to a long-distance network (3G, 4G, 5G, NB-IoT, and LPWA networks such as Sigfox or Lora).
Objects connected by short-range technologies will be largely in the majority (17.4 billion units in 2023) and their number will increase on average by 18% per year by 2023.
On the contrary, objects connected to a long-distance network will be very much in the minority ("only" 2.4 billion objects in 2023 and 600 million in 2017), but their number will grow faster: + 26% on average per year .
At the end of 2017, Ericsson estimates that about 500 million objects will be connected to IoT through a cellular connection. Their number is expected to reach 1.8 billion units, or 75% of the long-distance category. Clearly, Ericsson, one of the first equipment manufacturers of cellular network infrastructure, believes that Sigfox and LoRa will not break through ... What remains to be verified.
Currently, the long distance segment is dominated by GSM / GPRS technology, but unsurprisingly, by 2023, 4G LTE and 5G cellular technologies will take over. The 4G will then represent the majority of cellular IoT connections, while the 5G will support the most critical applications.
The first cellular IoT networks based on Cat-M1 and Narrow Band-IoT technologies (NB-IoT) were launched in early 2017 and Ericsson currently has more than 20 cellular IoT networks using these technologies. operating commercially around the world.
Source: VIPPress.net, November 29th, 2017
