A new whitepaper by 5G Americas outlines how the 5G Massive Internet of Things (MIoT) market is projected to be a major business driver of the telecom industry.

The whitepaper, titled “LTE Progress Leading to the 5G Massive Internet of Things”, has provided an overview of the technological advancements that will support the expanding IoT, connected cars and wearables markets. The term Massive IoT (MIoT) has been recently created by the telecom industry to refer to the connection for potentially large number of devices and machines that will call for further definition in the standards for LTE and later for 5G.

Jean Au, staff manager, technical marketing, Qualcomm Technologies, and co-leader of the whitepaper said: “Some cellular service providers in the U.S. are already adding more IoT connections than mobile phone connections, and the efforts at 3GPP in defining standards for the successful deployment of a wide variety of services across multiple industries will contribute to the growing success for consumers and the enterprise.”

At present, low-power wide-area (LPWA) is already gaining popularity and it is expected that cellular-based technologies including LTE-M (Machine) and Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) will emerge as the foremost standards for LPWA by 2020. Operators will have the option to choose from several Cellular IoT (CIoT) technologies depending on their spectrum portfolio, legacy networks and requirements of the services they offer.

Vicki Livingston, head of communications, 5G Americas, said: “There will be a wide range of IoT use cases in the future, and the market is now expanding toward both Massive IoT deployment as well as more advanced solutions that may be categorized as Critical IoT.”

You can read the full report here (pdf).