Global cellular IoT market value to grow by $30 billion in next 4 years: Juniper Research

A new report by Juniper Research reveals that the Cellular IoT market is expected to grow to $61 billion by 2026, up $30 billion from this year’s valuation.

According to the Cellular IoT report, which provides insights into the key trends and challenges facing the cellular IoT market, 5G and cellular low-power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies will be responsible for 95 percent of this growth.

According to a Juniper Research white paper on the subject, “The low cost of both connectivity and hardware will drive adoption for remote monitoring in key verticals, such as agriculture, smart cities and manufacturing. In turn, LPWA connections are expected to grow 1,200 percent over the next four years.”

Juniper highlights strategies for network operators to monetise cellular IoT services, including embedded SIMs (eSIMs), which are SIM cards that are built into devices and are not transferable.

“eSIM technology is not typically tied to a particular network and allows the user to change network provider without the need to physically remove and insert a conventional plastic SIM card,” the authors write.

“Mobile connectivity based upon eSIM principles has the potential to add a revenue stream to an ecosystem that has arguably plateaued; having exhausted conventional call, SMS, and data use cases at a time of significant costs to implement 5G infrastructure.”

According to the authors, the industrial sector is expected to account for 4 percent of eSIM installations by 2025.

Edge computing is another opportunity that is set to drive the growth of cellular IoT.

“Where data can lose relevance the longer it takes to process, the time-critical benefits of processing at the edge allows for quicker response times to data that has been sifted for importance,” the report states.

“The often remote settings of agricultural and farming applications of cellular IoT can be overcome by locally processed and stored data not otherwise dependent on unreliable connectivity with the cloud.”

Telecommunications providers are noted as crucial to the growth of cellular IoT, and those within large scale industrial settings will see the most opportunities for monetisation, the authors report.

“It is within this context that end-to-end solutions and the ability to facilitate a customer’s growing demand for cellular IoT-related edge computer services that will harness the potential to monetise fifth-generation connectivity in a way in which conventional ‘bread and butter’ markets are unable.”