Nokia Bell Labs said IoT connected devices will reach between 20 and 46 billion by 2020
Mobile operators will need to accelerate investments in areas such as 5G and cloud technologies in order to meet increasing consumer and business demand for mobile connectivity through 2020, according to a recent study by Bell Labs Consulting, a division of Nokia Bell Labs.
Bell Labs Consulting study shows that by 2020, 67% of the worldwide consumption demand forecast can be met by Wi-Fi technology. Another 14% can be addressed by the current adoption rate of 3G, LTE, small cells and the emergence of new technologies such as 5G. Bell Labs Consulting said that these figures show that 19% of demand will not be satisfied based on current and projected economics. This is why network operators will need to speed-up the process to adopt 5G and cloud technologies, such as network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN), and implement new business models to address the demand gap.
The study also revealed that the number of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices is expected to expand from 1.6 billion in 2014 to between 20 billion and 46 billion by 2020. Of this total, cellular IoT devices will be between 1.6 billion and 4.6 billion in 2020. Despite this massive adoption, the overall cellular traffic generated by IoT devices will only account for 2% of the total mobile traffic by 2020, according to the study.
Also, the study found that by 2020, global consumption demand for digital content and services on mobile and portable devices will see a global average increase of 30 to 45 times from the levels seen in 2014 levels. In North America, video communications traffic will grow from 47 to 86%, driven by millennial teens and young adults. As video calls and conferencing rises, email traffic will experience a decline, from the 47% of communication traffic it represented in 2014 to approximately 7% in 2020. The study also revealed that messaging will become a more dominant form of communications.
“The next evolution of humankind will involve ‘life automation’, and the creation of a world in which billions of interconnected things including smart objects, cameras, robots, sensors and processes exchange real time video and data streams This new digital era will produce a dramatic shift in demand, challenging mobile operators to achieve the highest performance at the lowest cost per bit while supporting extensive personalization,” Nokia Bell Labs’ president Marcus Weldon said.
Nokia Bell Labs launched its consulting division in March 2015, in order to carry out deep analysis, and sophisticated techno-economic modeling tools to some of the key challenges facing the IT and communications networking industry.
