According to the Dell'Oro Group, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a tremendous opportunity for vendors and operators to expand their revenues both by reaching new customers and by moving up the value chain. The research house suggests that wide area IoT applications will generate nearly $33 billion of revenue for service providers and mobile infrastructure vendors by 2022, growing around 2.5x over 2017 levels. Services based on cellular technologies are expected to account for more than 98% of service provider wide area IoT revenues.
"Service providers have invested in cellular technologies for the past 30-plus years," said Stefan Pongratz, senior director at Dell'Oro. "And they are now in a unique position to capture new revenue from a diverse set of IoT use cases with minimal incremental mobile infrastructure investments. The business case using cellular technologies, such as NB-IoT and LTE-M, is extremely compelling. Our analysis suggests the incremental investment in mobile radio access network and core infrastructure will yield around 30x of potential growth for the carriers by the end of the forecast period."