The roots of the emerging 'Internet of Things' (IoT) market lie in industrial machine-to-machine (M2M) systems. Historically, M2M monitoring was ideally suited to asset-intensive, complex processes that were spread over relatively wide areas. 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 add it to a range of household equipment, cars and security systems.
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.
A 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.
This report examines the ways in which the IoT may evolve, and considers some of its consequences in terms of, for example, data management, confidentiality and privacy. It includes a ten-year worldwide forecast of the number of Internet-connectable devices by type.
Internet 3.0: the Internet of Things answers your key questions:
- How quickly will the consumer IoT grow?
- What will drive and inhibit the IoT's growth?
- How should mobile operators engage with this new market opportunity?
- What are the key considerations in terms of data management and privacy?