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Swedish kit maker predicts non-cellular IoT connections to reach 14.2 billion in five years.
Ericsson on Wednesday predicted that the number of IoT connections worldwide will overtake mobile phone connections in 2018.
According to the company’s latest Mobility Report, overall connections will number 27.5 billion by 2021, with the IoT accounting for 15.7 billion of that total. By comparison, the number of mobile phone connections is expected to reach 8.6 billion.
Asia-Pacific is expected to be the largest market for IoT connections, followed by Western Europe and North America.
Mobile operators would do well to note that Ericsson expects cellular IoT connections to make up less than 10% of total IoT connections in 2021, which suggests that technologies such as WiFi and LoRaWAN, which use unlicensed spectrum, will dominate the IoT for the next five years at least.
"IoT is now accelerating as device costs fall and innovative applications emerge," said Rima Qureshi, Ericsson’s chief strategy officer, in a statement.
From 2020 onwards, Ericsson expects cellular networks to become increasingly important to the IoT as operators begin commercial 5G deployments.
"5G networks will provide additional capabilities that are critical for IoT, such as network slicing and the capacity to connect exponentially more devices than is possible today," Qureshi said.
By the end of 2021, Ericsson expects total 5G connections to reach 150 million. By then, LTE connections are forecast to grow to 4.3 billion compared to 1.2 billion at the end of the first quarter.
Meanwhile, 3G connections are expected to grow to 3.1 billion from 2.1 billion at the end of 2015, while 2G-only connections are expected to fall to 1.2 billion from 3.6 billion.
