Global IoT cellular connections to cross 5 billion marks by 2025

According to the latest research from Counterpoint, 5G to account for around 10 percent of global IoT cellular connections in 2025.

The report also said that Global IoT cellular connection grew 72 percent in the first half of 2018 -- a considerable increase as compared to the same period last year.

"Emerging markets like India, Brazil and in Africa while can offer tremendous scale but will likely be late followers compared to China in this path to connected everything. However, the massive growth opportunity remains in terms of cellular-IoT connections in emerging markets which will be possibly catalysed by operators such as Jio in India but more specifically from multi-market players such as Telefonica or MTN or Vodafone with plans to deploy LPWAN networks such as NB-IoT leveraging scale across their coverage markets," Counterpoint Research Analyst, Satyajit Sinha.

The Smart manufacturing, smart utilities and smart mobile applications such as automotive, asset tracking will be the key growth drivers over the next five to seven years.

Many of these applications will demand low-power, low-bandwidth, low-cost and ubiquitous cellular connectivity which will be initially satisfied by the emerging Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) cellular technologies like LTE-M, NB-IoT, and EC-GSM-IoT.

Further, futuristic applications such as autonomous cars, drones, connected healthcare, and mission-critical IoT applications will be powered by the upcoming 5G technology revolution which promises massive capacities, throughputs, and lower latencies."

"If operators are looking to capture maximum value, the strategies need to provide end-to-end IoT solutions by bundling IoT devices, secure connectivity, platform, and data management to capitalize on the overall opportunity," said Research Director Neil Shah.

2G IoT connections will occupy less than 1 percent of global IoT cellular connections by 2025. 3G IoT connections face the same fate as 2G.

"However, 3G will go extinct much faster than 2G," report added.