The perhaps common belief is that the growing use of connected sensors and devices is going to drive additional connectivity revenues, and that is true to some extent. But it is likely that most of the connections will not create additional connectivity account demand.
Consider consumer and household use of connected appliances and devices. Today, most smartphone users connect to Wi-Fi when indoors. That does not create demand for new mobile connections in a direct sense.
Likewise, our internet TV devices use Wi-Fi. Our smartwatches use Bluetooth. Most of the other devices, ranging from security cameras to appliance sensors, rely on Wi-Fi.
Only the more “industrial” sensing functions in our homes tend to create demand for additional communications circuits. Gas and power meters provide good examples.
In fact, though the details are likely to change as IoT actually becomes commercialized on a wide scale, though some new mobile connections are created, a fair number of other local connection technology platforms might emerge as significant pathways.
In many cases, those local connections will be to a local edge server most of the time, with external wide area communications on a less-frequent basis. So there is some additional impact on WAN data traffic, but not necessarily a direct increase in the number of connections because of additional IoT sensor or device use.
By some estimates, about 22 percent of IoT spending will be for connectivity. But some estimates suggest connectivity will be far less than that, as a percentage of total spending on IoT.
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