Majority of telcos ready to monetise IoT within five years

A report unveiled by Telecoms.com Intelligence has found that the majority of operators believe they’ll be ready to extract revenue from IoT within the next five years.

The IoT Outlook 2015 analysed data generated from close to 1,000 professionals from across the industry to more thoroughly understand the opportunity presented to operators by IoT, with 62.4% of all respondents saying they’re confident in monetising the technology by 2020. Meanwhile, Industrial IoT and home automation were seen as the most lucrative industry segments for operators, with 47.2% and 31.1% of votes respectively.

Respondents were also asked to identify the two biggest challenges operators face in bringing IoT to the fore, with security challenges and platform standardisation being the most commonly identified barriers to implementation, with 42.4% and 37.2% respectively. To that extent, just 10.2% of the audience said they’re confident in delivering fully secured IoT services today. Based on that, it would appear the operator community wants to jump two-footed into IoT services, unsurprising considering its undoubted revenue potential; however a distinct wariness over data protection is tempering ambition for the time being.

Elsewhere, 33% of respondents reckon cellular coverage and signal strength is the most important IoT-enabling feature of the network; while a further 62% believe IoT cannot exist without radio infrastructure managed by operators. Corroborating that, 55% of respondents thought the proportion of IoT data traffic being transmitted over the mobile network by 2020 will be in the 20-60% range.

Operators can expect to be firmly planted in the middle of the connected world of the future; simultaneously managing the data and traffic requirements from consumer, enterprise, industrial and governmental sectors. Not only will the operator network have to prioritise traffic when necessary, such as smart city or critical communications-related data, but it will also have to do so securely, flexibly and automatically, with the intelligence to analyse data in real-time.

The report is available to download for free from Telecoms.com Intelligence here: http://www.telecoms.com/intelligence/IoT-Outlook-2015