NSR: Satellite IoT market forecast at $2.9B by 2026

The global satellite M2M and IoT market is expected to grow to $2.9 billion in revenue by 2026, according to satellite based market research company NSR.

This growth will be driven by over 6.8 million in-service terminals, NSR said in their new report. Potential applications include (see chart below): land transport and especially cargo tracking, which is expected to be the most profitable and sought after segment of the emerging industry.

“Revenues are growing year-over-year across each of the 22 applications NSR identified, and will accelerate as new M2M capacity supply, in the form of new constellations, come online in the medium term,” NSR senior analyst and lead report author Alan Crisp said.

“Most increases in new demand for M2M service today stem from basic product offerings, as for many use cases bandwidth requirements remain in the kilobyte range,” Crisp added.

While most M2M and IoT services require only low bandwidth, NSR also predicts that over the next decade some verticals will demand additional bandwidth to support applications such as big data analytics, engine telematics and live data streaming.

The report states that a number of small satellite constellations will target low bandwidth and latency insensitive applications in  agriculture and tracking market segments.

Despite the huge revenues predicted, the report notes that despite growing demand for IoT satellite services, the business case for IoT exclusive satellite constellations has yet to be proven – especially considering the exponential growth of LPWANs, LTE-M and NB-IoT terrestrial networks for IoT.

For example, last week China Mobile-Hong Kong demonstrated a smart parking service carried over its commercial NB-IoT network.  Meanwhile, rival wireless network operators 3 Hong Kong (part of Hutchinson-HK) and SmarTone have also made recent announcements of NB-IoT deployments.  3 HK and Huawei have built the NB-IoT infrastructure with NB-IoT modules designed in accordance with the 3GPP standard to facilitate tests and development of NB-IoT applications.

This report answers key questions on the satellite M2M/IoT market:

  • Which applications, frequencies and regions exhibit the greatest growth potential?
  • How important are latency, security and high bandwidth requirements for upcoming M2M/IoT applications?
  • What role will small satellites have with IoT connected devices, and how will this impact the existing satellite M2M/IoT operators?
  • How can satellite benefit from the growth of Low Power Wide Area networks?

References:

http://www.nsr.com/research-reports/satellite-space-applications/m2m-and-iot-via-satellite-8th-edition/

https://www.telecomasia.net/content/satellite-iot-market-tipped-hit-29b-2026?src=related