A new report from the Internet of Things market research company Berg Insight claims that the number of global cellular Internet of Things users in 2020 has increased by 12% to 1.74 billion.
Regional markets Western Europe and North America have the highest growth rates, exceeding 15%.By 2025, Berg Insight now expects to have 3.74 billion IoT devices connected to the cellular network worldwide.
The total active base reported by the top ten mobile operators is 1.49 billion Cellular IoT connection By the end of 2020, it will account for 86% of the total number of connections. China Mobile is the world’s largest cellular IoT connection service provider, with an estimated 658 million cellular IoT connections. China Unicom and China Telecom ranked second and third with 240 million and 238 million connections respectively.
Fredrik Stalbrand, Senior Analyst at Berg Insight, said:
“2020 is the first year since the early 2010s that China’s cellular IoT connection growth has been below the global average, as the largest participant, China Mobile, has reported negative changes in its IoT user base.”
Following China Mobile’s decision to stop adding new IoT connections to its 2G network in the first half of 2020, it has embarked on a plan to migrate 2G users to NB-IoT and 4G LTE Cat-1 services.
Vodafone ranks first among Western operators, with a total number of connections of 118 million, and AT&T ranks fifth with 81 million. Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica have 26-48 million cellular IoT connections. Orange and Telenor are in the top ten, with approximately 18 million and 17 million connections, respectively. With the exception of Deutsche Telekom, the year-on-year growth rate of the aforementioned Western operators is between 8% and 22%.
Internet of Things connection services account for about 1% of the total revenue of most operator groups. Berg Insight’s analysis of IoT business KPIs released by mobile operators in different regions of the world shows that in 2020, global IoT connection revenue has increased by about 6%, while monthly APRU has dropped by 16% to 0.39 euros.
