The
Internet of Things (IoT) market opportunity across the cellular network will be worth $138.4 billion by 2018 with a compound annual growth rate of 33.2 percent. The key service provider verticals are connected car, home, industrial IoT, utilities, and wearable technology. The market is very fragmented with many players from a wide range of industries; however, each has fundamental approaches. Industry standards bodies and consortiums, such as OneM2M, IEEE-SA, ITU-T and IIC, are working on setting a single set of core standards to guide the industry.
All equipment providers are striving to position themselves as key vendors though at present no one has a complete solution. Ericsson, Cisco, ALU and recently Intel have horizontal IoT platform solutions that address early and late SP adopters. Ericsson leads the EP platform sales with total 1Q14 and 2Q14 revenue of $26.7 billion.
Service providers are a key part of the IoT value chain. However, to be successful, ACG recommends that SPs continue building out their core infrastructures by focusing on the common service entity functions: BSS/OSS, provisioning management, policy management, reporting management, data management, security management/governance and diagnostics.
Use cases are the best way to validate IoT implementations. For SPs, use cases that yield the most value have the following attributes: highly managed, mission critical, life dependent, warrant high liability, and regulatory constraints.