ABI Research

ABI Research, the leader in transformative technology innovation market intelligence, finds that smart home, beacon, wearable, and other nascent IoT applications including energy management and smart cities are to propel the wireless IoT connectivity market forward. The market’s trend toward multi-protocol connectivity IC adoption will ease development time, boost scale, and reduce complexity and cost for manufacturers across these different sectors in the years ahead.

In a report from ABI Research, smart watches will drive the most interest for wearables integration into the smart home even though fitness trackers were approximately two-thirds of all wearable device shipments in 2014. Recent announcements of Android Wear from Google and Apple Watch are driving integration efforts from various smart home platform vendors such as iControl, Alarm.com and Samsung’s SmartThings.

 LTE has turbocharged the mobile Internet experience for end-users, which is reflected in rapid adoption of LTE-capable smartphones along with other mobile devices, but it has also reinvigorated the broadband wireless marketplace. According to ABI Research, 1.26 billion households do not have DSL, cable or fiber-optic broadband.  

 According to ABI Research, the share of stand-alone Bluetooth ICs will be about 40 percent by the end of 2014, down from 42 percent  in 2013, and by the end of 2019 that share will remain at 40 percent. 

According to ABI Research, Asia-Pacific regional growth in basestations will outpace all other regions this year as it continues to account for the majority of worldwide basestation deployments. The Asia-Pacific region now becomes the largest market for LTE, followed by North America and Western Europe, with the Asia-Pacific regional installed base growing to 8X in 2014.

Enterprise femtocells will capture 97% of the $4.3 billion market revenue in 2019, outpacing consumer-residential femtocells, according to the latest forecast from ABI Research.

ABI Research’s latest forecast for outdoor small cells indicates a healthy 2014 growth in equipment revenue at a year-on-year rate of 33% to $1.8 billion. This growth comes thanks to operators like AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Telefonica, Softbank, SK Telecom, and Sprint driving shipments of both outdoor and Metrocell deployments.

With more than two-thirds of the global population expected to live in urban contexts by 2050, the deployment of smart cities technologies and intelligent transportation services in particular, will become key policy areas for local governments.  By 2025, penetration of ITS technologies in smart cities will range from 20% (autonomous vehicles) to 98% (traffic management).