There is a reason why the logistics sector is the favourite market for IoT. Because IoT, arguably, consists of only two distinct applications – asset tracking and condition monitoring – and the first of these, by definition, is about the positional aspect of ‘things’-in-motion. Which is a fairly good description of the logistics industry, at large, or at least a useful consequence of it – if position can be tracked. It is a favourite, as well, just because the second goes well with the first, in logistics especially.
In conversation, IoT vendor Telit – the biggest IoT module maker in the West, with a developing IoT airtime and management offer – lists its top applications for cellular IoT, and at least two entries (two of five; three of nine, as provided to Enterprise IoT Insights) might be fairly pegged as tracking scenarios. Its biggest market is telematics, accounting for 15-20 percent of the company’s total module shipments – which is just (after-market) M2M tracking of vehicles.
Its fourth biggest is straight tracking, which covers the positional logistics of (IoT-connected) assets in the supply chain. The seventh (not listed here) is public transportation, which dovetails with the first; and certain of the others – including smart factories and smart farming, at eight and nine (also not listed) – will cover aspects of indoor and outdoor tracking. As above, IoT monitoring is an increasingly crucial aspect of all of these applications, and the key driver for all the other static use cases.
Below, in brief, we present Telit’s top-five uses for cellular IoT – as quoted by Marco Stracuzzi, head of product marketing at Telit; all quotes are from Stracuzzi.
1 | Telematics / transportation
“When we say telematics, we mean everything that goes into the vehicle post-manufacturing – so it is different from automotive. It is more about after-market installations – in cars, trucks, scooters, bicycles, and so; everything you install in a vehicle, basically, to monitor it – which means tracking its position and other parameters.”
2 | Metering / energy
“The energy segment – mostly smart meters, for automatic reading of electricity, water, and gas – is a similar size for us (15-20 percent of shipments). It also covers smart grid applications – like gateways to connect secondary stations in the distribution network, although volumes are smaller than for meters on the grounds there are fewer endpoints. The other sub-segment is renewables, like solar panel inverters, usually connected with cellular for monitoring and remote control.”
3 | Alarlms / Security
“The third sector, also about the same size in percentage terms, is home and business security – alarm panels and surveillance cameras, covering all the alarm systems in houses and other buildings, and also CCTV in offices and cities. These applications benefit from cellular – because it is an easy installation, which does not require setup with a home router, or Wi-Fi network. The SIM module connects straight to the network, and, unlike Wi-Fi and fibre, is resilient to power outages on the grounds they typically come with a backup battery – so the alarm panel can still send its alarm.”
4 | Tracking / Supply chain
“Similar to telematics, but for tracking things – any type of thing, which is not the vehicle, itself. Cold-chain monitoring falls under tracking, for example. We [worked] earlier this year on the biggest Covid-19 vaccine cold-chain monitoring project with Controlant, using our cellular modules in its data loggers – sold to Pfizer to monitor vaccine temperatures during shipments. No other technology guarantees global tracking like cellular – in trucks, airports, ports, ships. You can’t track with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, for example.”
5 | Vending / Retail
“Most vending machines are connected with cellular – to ensure payments, to push advertisements to drive sales, to monitor the status of the machine to know when to refill snacks. LPWA technologies like Cat-M are good. 2G fallback is nice to have just because cellular LPWA technologies are not available everywhere. For push advertising… NB-IoT does not work for this type of real-time interaction; LTE-M can work. Otherwise it has to be Cat-1.”
