The growth is driven by many verticals’ new urgency to digitalise in the pandemic era, after a slowdown in spending on tech this year.
Kaleido Intelligence predicts a big increase in IoT roaming traffic in the next five years in its Roaming Data Hub – Q3 2020, up from 127 Petabytes in 2020 to more than 560 PBs in 2025.
The company says COVID-19 has led to a temporary contraction in tech investment by businesses. This includes IoT, which is expects “only” to increase by 9% year on year since 2019.
Positive outlook
Nevertheless, Kaleido thinks several factors will contribute to a sustained acceleration in connectivity demand into the medium-term, including support for remote working, automation, and remote monitoring, all of which are critical for business continuity.
Next year will see renewed investment as part of risk mitigation strategies. Steffen Sorrell, Research Lead at Kaleido Intelligence noted, “COVID-19 has added a positive outlook for IoT connectivity providers, with IoT roaming connections set to see average annual growth to the tune of 33% between 2020 and 2025.
The risk to businesses is simply too high and will therefore warrant the comparatively higher cost of cellular technology to support risk mitigation strategies.”
Consumers’ impact on 5G data roaming
The company reckons 5G consumer roaming will be less impacted by the disruption and will bring new opportunities, service levels and usage levels.
Kaleido predicts an increased adoption for 5G roaming services from 2023 onwards. Until then 5G consumers who roam are expected to be fewer than 10 million, which equates to less than 2% of mobile roamers around the globe.
However, 5G data roaming traffic is forecast to approach 800PB in 2025, accounting for over 46% of total consumers’ roaming data traffic.