Transforma Insights has released its forecasts for private network connectivity for IoT for 2019 to 2030, illustrating one of the most dynamic areas of IoT connectivity. Private networks are, of course, already in widespread use with short range technologies such as Wi-Fi and Zigbee currently accounting for around 70% of all connections. What is relatively new is the use of private networks using wide area technologies such as 4G and 5G.
At the end of 2030 Transforma Insights expects that there will be more than 150 million cellular devices connected to on-premise private networks, up from 3 million at the end of 2019. As a proportion of all cellular devices this represents a growth from 0.3% to 3% of all connections. Today the majority of these devices are LTE, but over the forecast period the balance shifts towards 5G, particularly in the form of mMTC Low Power Wide Area devices.