The COVID-19 crisis has delayed or otherwise diminished plans and aspirations aplenty, IoT notwithstanding.

Almost everyone believes that anything and everything will be connected to a network backbone, but the speed with which IoT takes hold remains a moving target.

Analysys Mason revised its forecast for global IoT connections downward from its previous outlook noting that the impact of the global pandemic is partly to blame. But the new forecast noted that low power wide area (LPWA) IoT adoption has been slower than expected. 

“The total number of wireless IoT connections worldwide will increase from 1.5 billion at the end of 2019 to 5.8 billion in 2029,” analysts at the firm wrote. “Growth in the number of IoT connections has slowed down during the pandemic due to both demand-side and supply-side factors.”

During the last year, IoT contracts have been canceled or delayed, new car sales (one of the fastest growing segments of IoT) have declined, and supply chains were strained but starting to recover, the market research firm explained. 

Delays that have long beset IoT, and machine-to-machine (M2M) frameworks that preceded it, are still apparent but not as significant as they were a few years ago, explained Stefan Pongratz, VP at Dell’Oro Group.

“While some might have expected this to be larger by now, the reality is that IoT revenues are still growing at a faster pace than non-IoT revenues and remain on track to account for 5% of operators’ wireless revenues by 2025, up from 1% to 2% in 2019,” he wrote in response to questions.

Bill Curtis, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said previous IoT growth projections “were wildly inaccurate” because IoT was misunderstood to be a quantifiable category or specific technology trend. 

“Five years ago, industry analysts predicted that IoT would consist of 25 billion, 30 billion, or even 50 billion connected devices by 2020. The actual number turned out to be somewhere around 6 or 7 billion,” Curtis wrote in an email to SDxCentral.

IoT growth is falling short of previous sky-high projections because systems integration development is complicated, “the chasm between cloud and edge intelligence is too wide, and antiquated assumptions about embedded platforms constrain device product architecture,” he explained. 

IoT has progressed during the last few years, but “2021 is the watershed year when we reach the tipping point in each of these three areas, resulting in substantial and predictable returns on IoT project investments,” Curtis added. 

Pongratz concurred with that assessment, adding that “there is always a bit of a disconnect between vision and reality.” Progress was slow in the first 10 to 15 years of M2M and now IoT, but “momentum and IoT adoption has improved rather significantly over the past couple of years or so since 3GPP started addressing LPWA technologies,” he added. 

“IoT connections are accelerating now at a modest pace globally,” Pongratz wrote, adding that it’s important to understand that IoT represents major shifts for every player in the ecosystem. “The adoption curve will vary widely across regions and use cases. … IoT underperformed initially, but the outlook remains positive with LPWA and broadband IoT while critical IoT and ultra reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) will take some time.”