Cellular IoT Connectivity Growth Opportunities

5G and LPWAN Bring Opportunities for New Applications and Use Cases to Flourish in Different Verticals

The global cellular IoT market is in the growth stage, with telecom operators expanding in terms of net add connections and revenue. Despite the acceleration initiative by the ecosystem to shut down their 2G and 3G networks, the cellular IoT market is evolving fast. A large number of developing economies continue to use 2G and 3G to ensure connectivity at a low cost. However, global 4G adoption surpassed other wireless technologies, and NB-IoT became the fastest-growing technology in China in 2022, which impacted overall market growth.

LTE-M is expanding rapidly in the US market. In 2023, 5G was commercially available in the most advanced economies in APAC, North America, Europe, LATAM, and EMEA, and network rollouts continued growing in emerging economies.

Total cellular IoT market revenue is estimated to grow from $8.3 billion in 2022 to $15.6 billion in 2028, expanding at a CAGR of 10.9% from 2022 to 2028.

The major telecom operators delivering cellular IoT data services include China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica. Besides delivering connectivity services with flexible data plans, easy deployment, and high quality, participants are developing ecosystems with cloud providers, system integrators, and hardware manufacturers to test innovative solutions with 5G RedCap as well as terrestrial and non-terrestrial network (NTNs) solutions. This market influences growth opportunities in different areas for both consumer and enterprise use cases.

Cellular IoT supports a wide range of use cases, including low-complexity deployments that require low data transmission; devices with higher throughput and low latency; as well as latency-sensitive applications and edge computing.

This study provides a forecast analysis of revenue and cumulative IoT connections from 2022 until 2028; revenue forecast by segments (protocol, vertical, and region); and cumulative IoT connections by segments (protocol, vertical, and region).