Published on the 01/11/2010 | Written by Newsdesk
A report looking at the technology space in 2020 predicts that soon there will not be many devices not connected to the internet…
In what it calls the consumer “Internet of Things,”or IoT, the report predicts there will be almost 16 billion connectable devices worldwide by 2020.
Global telecoms, media and IT adviser Analysys Mason adds that 16 billion connectable consumer devices by 2020 may actually be a conservative estimate.
“Taking into account the uncertainties inherent in forecasting new technologies 10 years out, we believe that a realistic maximum number of devices may be 44 billion, and 6 billion a realistic minimum,” said analyst Jim Morrish, “That’s a worldwide average of between 0.8 and 5.8 devices for each person alive in 2020.”
Smart meters
The roots of the emerging IOT market lie in industrial machine-to-machine (M2M) systems. As the prices of M2M communications equipment have fallen, manufacturers have installed the technology in an increasing amount of consumer energy meters (known as ‘smart meters’), and have started to install it in a range of household equipment, cars and security systems.
An individual consumer’s window into the IOT is likely to take the form of a smartphone handset. Behind that handset will sit aggregation and filtering functions, management and control functions, and the actual devices that constitute the consumer IOT.
“The most direct potential consequence of the IOT is the generation of huge quantities of data. In a hypothetical IOT environment, every physical object (and many virtual objects) may have a virtual twin in ‘the cloud’, which could be generating regular updates,” said Morrish.
He added that the IoT has yet to become a mass-market proposition. All of the technologies and tools required to create the IoT are available, and at suitably low price points, but they have yet to be pulled together in a cohesive and user-friendly package, and the necessary scale has not been achieved.
