Strategy Analytics forecasts that sales of 4G IoT modules will peak within three years, sales of 5G modules will begin slowly in 2019, with 2024 a key inflection point as 5G module sales outstrip those of 4G modules. The Automotive vertical market will be the single largest consumer of IoT cellular modules across the forecast period, but will significantly increase its market share position by 2025.
SimCom was the global market leader in cellular IoT modules in 2017, where performance was significantly up on that of 2016 as a result of deals struck in China. Quectel displaced Sierra Wireless to become the no.2 ranked vendor, having displayed rapid expansion over the last few years.
Andrew Brown, Executive Director of Enterprise and IoT Research at Strategy Analytics, said, “The low latency/high bandwidth benefits of 5G will allow IoT use cases where near-instantaneous communications are required, while the projected ten year battery life capability of 5G modems will allow for mMTC (massive Machine-Type Communications), potentially matching the life of the 5G modem to the application. Of course, growth is dependent of a critical mass of 5G network deployments and in many cases low power 4G technologies (such as LTE Cat M and NB IoT) will remain perfectly sufficient in the medium term, while the dominance of Chinese vendors and large 2G deployments in China show that the death of 2G has been greatly exaggerated.”
Matt Wilkins, Senior Analyst IoT Research at Strategy Analytics added, “The changing flavor of cellular IoT module air interfaces represents just one of the challenges the end user community has to wrestle with as it deploys IoT. Yet the network-slicing benefits of 5G, such as being applicable for low as well as high bandwidth applications, will propel 5G to become increasingly important.”