Every quarter the Transforma Insights team tracks how many cellular IoT connections are reported by mobile network operators (MNOs) around the world. The end year figures are particularly important as they're (a) more accurately reported and (b) critical for how we benchmark the whole year.
At the end of 2022 we estimate that the top 37 operator groups around the world (which must account for close to 99% of connections) recorded a total of 1.97 billion connections, up from 1.69 billion at the end of 2021. The first thing to note is that this 17% growth in 2022 is a consistent performance on the back of 20% growth in 2021. The market has seen growth in enterprise IoT deployments and also across consumer use-cases especially metering applications.
Strong growth rates were recorded by Telia (41%), China Telecom (39%), NTT (35%), and Orange (33%). The lowest growth rates were seen by Telenor (11%), Softbank (10%) and Swisscom (9%). Most operators score somewhere between 12% and 26% growth.
