In sum – what you need to know:
Vodafone hits IoT milestone – UK-based operator has connected its 200 millionth IoT device, a healthcare monitor, with IoT sales accelerating 50% in the last five years to double in volume.
IoT matures as hype fades – despite overblown forecasts, the IoT market has stabilised and matured, albeit with fewer players; practical IoT is now just another line-of-business for enterprises.
New M2M trading economy – a future where IoT devices trade data using blockchain is coming, says Vodafone; three billion will autonomously trade between themselves by 2030, it reckons.
UK-based Vodafone, one of the few mobile operators to still be making a proper business of low-power low-margin IoT airtime solutions, has connected its 200 millionth IoT device, it reckons – a healthcare monitor, it turns out, providing remote patient data about cardiac health and other vital signs to doctors. It is a long way, in both devices-shipped and years-passed, from its very first IoT connection, it noted – nominally, a screen-mounted vehicle navigation unit, activated in 2009.
The announcement is a marker in the sand for Vodafone, basically, timed to coincide with IoT Day (today, April 9), as designated by a self-appointed IoT Council, formed by engineers in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) at the Radiator Festival in the UK, the same year (2009) Vodafone activated its in-car nav’ unit. It is hard to know how long IoT Day has been going, but it has gathered loose momentum in IoT circles in recent years. (Various types from the UK IoT industry will be in Brick Lane today, hosted by Transforma Insights.)
But Vodafone, which split its IoT business from its main group operation 12 months ago (with a mission to “hyper-scale”), took the chance to reflect: ironically, perhaps, that 200-million count has accelerated quickly in the last few years, just as the cellular IoT market seemed to lose patience with the original mad-cap forecasts about gazillions of IoT devices, and the scene has consolidated as big players have quit. All the while, Vodafone has doubled its managed base of IoT connections to 200 million during the last five years, it said.
More than a quarter of those are located in Germany, apparently – which is the group’s biggest operating market. It said in a statement: “Growth has been driven by organisations investing in new digital technologies to boost productivity, strengthen supply-chains, track assets, and collect data for analysis. For example, IoT devices connected by Vodafone are being used to track the movement, quality and quantity of coal from 200 mines across South Africa; and in Europe, it is facilitating monitoring of water leaks and forest fires.”
It seems a shame – for RCR Wireless, which has tracked the IoT market since the beginning, but closed its IoT title (Enterprise IoT Insights) 18 months ago for a lack of marketing capital in the sector, and just because IoT had effectively justified the hype to become an everyday line-of-business – that it even needs saying. More than half of Vodafone’s IoT connections “directly enable customers” to reduce emissions, said Vodafone – by automating energy usage in electricity grids, tracking energy consumption in buildings, and also regulating traffic congestion, and so on.
If the industry could just sort out its dirty secret – that cheap low-power sensors are, by nature, disposable in the end, and dumped in landfill – then the IoT industry, instrumenting the planet to make business smarter and greener, would be an irrefutable force-for-good. (As a note, it is trying, and progress is clear, albeit slow.) Vodafone, which has featured at the top of Gartner’s ‘magic quadrant’ marketing exercise for 11 years straight, has good innovation around the broader money-making ecosystem, as well.
“New digital markets are being established,” it said. “This is leading to the Economy of Things, where connected devices securely trade with each other.” The firm has an 80/20 blockchain trading joint-venture called Pairpoint with Japanese trading company Sumitomo Corporation, which has subsumed Vodafone’s own Economy of Things platform. It issued a report a couple of years back, written by consultancy STL Partners, that there will be (up to) 3.3 billion IoT devices variously trading with each other in such an ‘economy of things’ by the end of the decade.
The number is a colossal jump from just 88 million devices in 2024, suggested STL at the time; in total, it says 10 percent of the entire IoT market – putting the IoT market at 33 billion devices by 2030 – will autonomously interconnect and inter-trade. Pairpoint has a deal with professional services company Deloitte and IoT tracking firm Nexxiot to verify the provenance of IoT data in the international logistics market. It is also working with smart label pioneer Sensos, a spin-off from Sony Semiconductor Israel, to combat supply chain fraud.
Vodafone flagged its seminal work, mostly via Sensos and Kigen, in the smart label market, which attempts to scale IoT to everyday parcel deliveries – and also counter some of the dirty-secret issues above, – and which makes use of integrated SIM (iSIM) technology. It stated: “Vodafone is integrating its IoT SIM into the chipset of a device at the point of manufacture… to simplify processes, reduce costs, and automate deployments. This makes the technology effective for large-scale deployments, like smart labels used to track parcels through their journey, or smart meters.”
Marika Auramo, chief executive at Vodafone Business, commented: “This major milestone underlines the critical role Vodafone’s global IoT network plays in supporting many thousands of businesses and public sector organisations in more than 180 countries. Whether it’s connecting smart sensors or industrial robots, our digital network infrastructure is transforming lives and powering economies.”
Erik Brenneis, CEO of Vodafone IoT, said: “Reaching and surpassing the 200 millionth IoT connection is a huge moment in our history, and reflects the dedication, innovation and spirit of our team. As a global leader in managed IoT – where we do everything to connect anything – we will continue to push the boundaries to further improve lives and businesses. This milestone is just the beginning of our hyperscale journey, and I’m sure we’ll be celebrating many more moments like this in years to come.”
