A new report by connectivity experts Kaleido Intelligence has found that cellular smart manufacturing deployments will grow to over 150 million connections, almost trebling 2023 deployments.
Kaleido’s latest report, Cellular IoT Connectivity Series: Manufacturing Opportunities & Forecasts 2023-2028, shows that while overall penetration of cellular connectivity into factories will remain low, those areas that are building new factories rapidly will have an accelerated path to connectivity. As such, several European markets will approach or exceed 20% of factories with cellular connectivity by 2028, while the East Asia & Pacific region as a whole will have 13%.
Edge Computing vital in a data-heavy environment
The new research shows what automation use cases will be key to the emerging smart manufacturing sector, detailing how the sector will generate over 240 petabytes of data as video-based analytics takes off.
“In the manufacturing environment, deploying edge computing to limit data transport distances will be vital to maintaining the low latency required for many use cases,” said James Moar, research author. “Our survey-based research shows that providing strong value-added services to support advanced devices will be a key competitive advantage for connectivity providers in this sector.”
Revenue opportunity to be heavily divided
Kaleido’s report shows that connectivity will generate over $5 billion by 2028, with much of it concentrated in the US and China, with Europe and Central Asia also creating substantial opportunities here. This revenue will be heavily fragmented between providers, with Kaleido’s survey showing the majority of enterprises using cellular IoT expect to deal with multiple connectivity providers. This is exacerbated when non-cellular data is considered, with few respondents seeing a single data platform as a necessity. As a result, manufacturing connectivity will remain a divided market, with competition between cellular and non-cellular in many areas, particularly for low-power sensors.
Despite this, with many forms of connectivity being used, Kaleido believes aggregation and data transport can be a key use case, particularly in areas with large manufacturing campuses or multiple sites. Indeed, collection of non-cellular data to cellular gateways is emerging as a strong use case. Particularly for 5G, where few devices are available, Kaleido’s report shows how use as data transport via multi-connectivity routers will be a key first step for getting this new technology into many factories.
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