Mobile Experts recently released an update on the future of IoT. The analysts at Mobile Experts have spent two years investigating the IoT market from the bottom up, and not another “top down” forecast hurling guesses at the size of the market.
Mobile Experts interviewed customers like Ford, GE, Johnson Controls, PG&E, UPS, and Kaiser Permanente to gain a clear view of the top tier in five key vertical markets. Over 150 interviews over the past two years have built up their forecast one market area at a time. Then, the top-tier enterprise view was compared with input from dozens of semiconductor vendors, to triangulate on a realistic forecast.
“The IoT market has started a new growth phase due to the release of new wireless formats, including BLE, LoRa, LTE-M, and NB-IoT,” remarked Principal Analyst Joe Madden. “These are a solid improvement on prior wireless formats, since they offer long-range connectivity with long battery life. Over the long term, we expect the current list of 70 IoT connectivity technologies to consolidate down to 20-25 technologies, based on seven key differentiating factors that we describe in more detail in this report.”
Known for accuracy and not hype, Mobile Experts has, once again, come out with a much lower forecast than their competitors. Their predictions show an installed base of 6-10 billion IoT devices in 2020, while many others are estimating 20 billion devices in 2020. Mobile Experts’ systematic and time-consuming approach has proved far more accurate in the past, and they’re confident that it will again.
“More than 10 billion RFID tags are shipping this year, so a lot of the market hype is based on large numbers of devices that cost ten cents each. We don’t include RFID in our IoT forecast, but we analyze RFID in great detail because existing techniques like RFID, AMR/AMI, and telematics have already established an ecosystem in key vertical markets. There is important growth in the existing markets, and the examples of RFID, telematics, and smart meters are a good way to gauge the speed of growth in newer markets,” commented Principal Analyst Joe Madden. “We followed a logical approach, to avoid guesswork in every step of our process.”
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