Twenty-eight percent of businesses say they already have live projects and an additional 35 percent say they are less than a year away from launching their own IoT efforts. Of those companies investing in IoT, 89 percent have increased their budgets in the last year. And 63 percent of companies who have already rolled out IoT say they are seeing “significant” return on that investment.

And these companies are ready to spend to get closer to their goals. Respondents said they spend an average of 24 percent of their IT budgets on IoT, a percentage similar to what they spend on analytics, mobility, or the cloud.

This connected landscape is one that businesses are excited to embrace.

Infrastructure

Since most connected objects have very different needs from those of, say, the average iPhone user, networks and infrastructure optimized for IoT.

One great example is the South Korean LoRaWAN, a nationwide low power, wide area network (LPWAN) deployed across South Korea by telecommunications operator SK Telecom, working in partnership with Samsung. Just a few weeks ago, SK Telecom revealed that they had completed the rollout of the LoRaWAN network six months ahead of schedule.

The network uses LoRa (as in Long Range) technology from Semtech, which allows a sensor network to operate on low power while providing strong connectivity over a long distance. The SK Telecom LPWAN covers 99 percent of South Korea’s population and the provider predicts that it will have over four million things connected to its IoT networks by the end of next year.

The Semtech chips are quite inexpensive, and LoRaWAN networks have been rolled out in a number of smaller settings, but never before on this scale. It’s a world-first, and one of which the carrier is justifiably proud. 

“SK Telecom is proud to announce the nationwide deployment of a LoRaWAN-based commercial network,” said Lee Hyung-hee, President of Mobile Network Business at SK Telecom, “as it marks the first important step towards realizing connectivity between infinite number of things, going beyond the traditional role of telecommunications centered on connectivity between people.”

And similar projects are taking place all over the world. For example, Verizon and Ericsson have been working on a project that leverages Verizon’s existing LTE network to support an LPWAN dedicated to IoT. Also, companies like SigFox and Ingenu are rolling out LPWAN networks. SigFox boasts 7 million devices in 18 countries and it was recently announced that Atari is planning to make devices that connect to the SigFox LPWAN.

Rad. 

Boundless Possibility

And that’s just one example. All over the world, networks are gearing up to connect a wide array of devices to one another and to us. Gartner estimates that we’ll have 25 billion connected devices by 2020. Cisco’s John Chambers has said that number may be closer to 50 billion devices by 2020 and a staggering 500 billion by 2030. He has also pegged IoT as a $19 trillion market.

With such growth possible, how can IoT not be the future of communications? Or at least a tremendous chunk of it.