The Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t just an opportunity for local connectivity providers. As IoT matures, international Carriers can play an increasing role in supporting its growth and development.
The challenge is to tap into this revenue opportunity and to enable IoT to go beyond borders. So far, smart city platforms have been largely delivered across a metro area but there’s an opportunity for platforms to be replicated and to grow with the support of the international Carrier ecosystem.
Similarly, verticals like oil and gas or transport could benefit from large-scale deployments that go beyond single instances or local markets. The emergence of global IoT platforms and services will give the international Carrier ecosystem new opportunities but some new challenges as well.
While traditional Carrier businesses have been shaped by user-centric services like Voice and enterprise applications, IoT has almost limitless potential. According to Gartner, by 2020 there will be approximately 20 billion devices connected to the internet. It estimates that in the same timeframe hardware spending on IoT will reach almost $3 trillion.
With this number of devices deployed and dependent on connectivity, Carriers will have to go far beyond ‘Best Effort’. While many Carriers have deployed IPX networks that support Quality of Service and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), global IoT platforms will benefit from IoT-centric SLAs that have been shaped to meet the strict needs of these platforms.
The Carrier ecosystem will need to collaborate on what IoT-centric SLAs might look like while platform providers will be looking for new levels of redundancy to support their applications and services. These challenges only grow when considering use cases beyond business applications.
If the welfare and safety of citizens are at stake, the platform has to have reliable and consistent performance. This adds a new complexity to Carriers, service providers and enterprise ICT environments. With collaboration from across the international Carrier ecosystem, we can accelerate the development of IoT and take it to new places.
It is an exciting opportunity but there’s plenty of work that needs to be done for IoT to be a success on a global scale. The benefit of working together is that, we can influence IoT’s development and ensure that there are no limits on its technology.
Our IoT work group analyze the impact of IoT in existing and new services for Carriers as well as the potential issues in the communication market due to the rapid growth of IoT.
To read the whitepaper click here to: http://i3forum.org/blog/2017/05/16/iot-whitepaper-exploring-iot-for-carriers/
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