From 2020 to 2030, IoT is going to undergo a hugely revolutionary period – transforming businesses and commerce in its path from industrial to healthcare and supply chain and logistics. A number of technology developments and market demands are going to accelerate IoT, which was already a growing industry, but will be enabled further as these tech developments mature.
Robust coverage is a concern in any IoT deployment, as solutions rely on connectivity to perform the task of collecting, transmitting, and storing data. One of the promises of this upcoming Decade of IoT is the ability to connect devices that support analytics that would benefit agriculture, logistics, and fleet – to help mitigate sustainability and supply chain issues; or critical applications in healthcare; or those applications that run mostly off of machine learning and artificial intelligence, like autonomous machinery or robotics.
With 5G supporting high-bandwidth, low latency applications, and low power wide area (LPWA) networks designed to support constant communications in widespread deployments, concerns of robust connectivity have the potential to wane as these technologies are more widely available.
Security in IoT isn’t a new concern, but as the number of connected devices grows – an estimated 75 billion by 2025 – so does the concern for end-to-end security. While regulations remain on the table as a means for attaining greater IoT security compliance, a hardware solution has been developed by GSMA.
IoT SAFE (IoT SIM Applet for Secure End-to-End Communications) is a technology that makes it easier to deploy and operate an IoT solution that is secure, scalable, and manageable over time. It helps solve the challenge of provisioning millions of IoT devices across an ecosystem by enabling provisioning and credential lifecycle management from a remote IoT security service.
Permanent roaming has been a significant hindrance in the adoption of IoT. Those solutions that want to span the globe with its connectivity reach are limited by connectivity regulations from country to country and tied down by permanent roaming.
The solution to this is eSIM, and while this technology has been discussed for several years, the industry is seeing the true promise of the embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card (eUICC) technology. The ability to remotely provision network connectivity to devices without having to physically swap the SIM card allows a device to switch networks over-the-air (OTA). As eSIM becomes more and more of a proven technology, the global expansion of IoT is going to be much more achievable and help allay the traditional concerns around roaming restrictions.
The adoption of eSIM is anticipated to reach 2.4 billion connected devices by 2025, according to Kaleido Intelligence as the demand from consumer to IoT grows.
KORE and other industry experts recently weighed in on the state of the industry based on global Kaleido Intelligence survey results, which studied more than 750 enterprises across 5 industry verticals. Watch the on-demand webinar, "Serving the Enterprise: The Cellular IoT Connectivity Opportunity."