3.5 Billion IoT connections by 2023, a forecast by Ericsson Mobility Report

Ericsson Mobility Report June 2018 has predicted that there will be 3.5 Billion cellular IoT connections by 2023. The recent forecast has doubled the predictions due to large-scale deployments in China, the Erricson report said. Previous November forecast predicted 1.8 billion connected cellular IoT devices.

Subscription footprint of the 5G rollout will be around 1 billion and will account for 20 percent of mobile data traffic. The reason being 5G, the fifth generation network technology, will enable enhanced mobile broadband. 5G is ten times faster than existing 4G cellular network technology.
Out of 3.5 Billion cellular IoT connections, North East Asia will account for 2.2 Billion connections. This growth will impact different verticals of businesses and markets.

NB-IoT and Cat-M1 IoT cellular technologies are driving growth in the number of IoT connections. The composite annual growth rate (CAGR) is expected to be 30 percent between 2017 and 2023.
The report also stated that the total number of connected devices including PC/laptop/tablets/Mobile phones/Fixed phones will grow from 17.5 billion devices in 2017 to 31.4 billion devices in 2023 with CAGR of 11 percent.

Snip from Erricsion Mobility Report 2018

Both Cat-M1 IoT cellular technology is used in North Americas for logistics and fleet management while NB-IoT cellular technology is selected for smart cities and smart agriculture in China. The major and large-scale deployment of IoT technologies will demand higher volumes of the chipset which is expected to drive down the chipset prices. This will again help in the overall growth of IoT connections.

The Ericsson mobility report is available here.