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 a new report. Potential applications include 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.”
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 analysis, engine telematics and live data streaming.
A number of small satellite constellations will meanwhile target low bandwidth and latency insensitive applications in areas including the agriculture and tracking segments.
But the report finds 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 LPWA and NB-IoT terrestrial networks.