Huawei's 2015 Global Connectivity Index (GCI) which benchmarks 50 economies in terms of connectivity, ICT usage, and digital transformation, providing an indicator of which countries are best poised for development and growth, and an ICT planning reference for firms looking to embrace the digital economy.
The 2015 edition of the GCI sees a more comprehensive and advanced framework and methodology. With double the number of ICT variables and countries analyzed last year, this year’s GCI enables the drawing of correlations needed to establish investment targets for governments and other stakeholders. What distinguishes the GCI from similar indices is a broader definition of connectivity that encompasses networks, computing, and storage, while also emphasizing the non-infrastructure elements of a functional digital economy, such as service demand, and e-commerce activity, etc.
It also attempt to predict trends, and it is clear that the IoT is going ot have a big impact: “The free fall cost of building and running the future ICT platform will create the environment for innovation like we have never seen before, thus impacting the economic growth opportunities for those countries that take advantage of it.
Some of the trends it expects to see continue include:
• The cost of IoT sensors continue to drop in half every 10 years.
• The cost of computer processing improves by seventy-fold in the same period.
By placing sensors into products,which become “smart, connected” products, a new industrial revolution is possible. But connectivity into this data-rich infrastructure allows analytics-based information to flow across a complete supply chain, from design, to manufacturing, to distribution, to consumption. Consequently, IoT will enable better manufacturing processes to be established with higher asset utilisation, better reliability, and new and rapidly deployed functionalities and capabilities.
Outbound marketing and after-sales services will be changed forever in companies. However, the biggest change IoT brings is the massive increase in contact with customers from all industries. Looking at the major areas in which IoT will be deployed. In 2025, Huawei forecasts that about 55% of IoT use cases will come from the business-facing (smart manufacturing, smart city, smart utilities, etc.) representing heavy investment to obtain productivity gains, asset management, and competitive advantage. Consumer-facing IoTs at 45% comprising smart homes, smart lifestyle, smart car etc. will improve quality of life and sustainability.
In other words, the most important necessity for IoT — connectivity — will become so ubiquitous and widespread that by 2025, sensors will be deployed and connected to a network at a rate of almost 2 million per hour or just over 47 million per day. By 2025, we could see the number of IoT devices installed, connected, and autonomously managed will reach 100 billion, up from 35 billion just five years prior in 2020 (or a staggering 300% growth!).