DIGITAL INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS: ASSET TRACKING OCTOBER 2020 ASSET – and the march towards MASSIVE IOT by James Blackman Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights FEATURE REPORT 1 | What is asset tracking and what is it worth? (It’s a jungle – and it’s massive) Asset tracking is the oldest game in town, and remains the great engine of IoT; so why is it so hard to hit targets? hat is asset tracking, any- Who is right? Because no one communica- 50bn way? And what is it worth? tions’, and sets – IoT connections by Because tracking of machine agrees; which is the trouble five require- 2025; the sector has data, one way or another, is ments: battery been struggling to with crystal-gazing. Except live up to this famous Weasily conflated with the internet-of-things life of 10 years; there is consensus across forecast since (IoT) movement, at large. And we all know coverage pene- 2010 about the mad growth slated for gener- the stats and specs that it is tration of 164 dB; al-purpose IoT. Fifty billion connections, by going to be ‘massive’, and an throughput of 160 bits 2025? Gulp. argument to say it already is per second; capacity of million devices That single finger-in-the-air forecast, per square kilometre; round-trip latencies by Cisco and Ericsson, way back in 2010, so. A billion is a billion, after of 10 seconds; and, importantly, ultra-low has cast an impossible shadow over the all, and smartphone sales, by cost hardware. sector’s progress; the industry has been comparison, have stalled at These are the terms for cellular to serve trying to shake it ever since, even as it has massive-scale IoT. But they guide the traits grappled for massive scale. Because ‘mas- two percent growth. of other low-power wide-area (LPWA) net- sive’ is the word in IoT circles; it is implicit working technologies – notably non-cellu- in analyst forecasts and specified in cellular lar Sigfox and LoRaWAN, which have had standards. a run on ‘massive’ IoT while the cellular The incoming 5G ‘ecosystem’ – for once, industry has pulled its socks up, rolling the term is useful, to describe a multi-fac- out NB-IoT and LTE-M, the twin LTE-based eted fifth-generation cellular tech sup- low-power IoT technologies, as the fore- posed to get under the skin of the global runners for 5G-era mMTC. economy – presents a three-tier family of Importantly, these technological stand- specifications, including a go-faster ver- ards are being pushed against, as well, to sion of mobile broadband (eMBB), already reduce cost and bring scale. here, an industrial-grade variant scheduled But is IoT ‘massive’, yet? It looks pretty big for some time after 2022/23 (URLLC), and already, propped up by these proprietary a low-power machine technology (mMTC) LPWA technologies. Depending on who designed to kit-out most of those forecasts. you talk to (trust), the current run-reports This last acronymical spec, defined five say IoT connections will go from 7.6 billion years ago in Release 13 of the 5G NR stand- in 2019 to 24.1 billion in 2030 (Transforma ard, declines as ‘massive machine-type Insights), or else double between 2019 and 2 FEATURE REPORT First cases – asset tracking has so far focused on expensive goods, whether high-value single items like cars (below left) or high-value cargoes, such as container-loads (above) / (Images: 123rf) 2025, to land at about 24 billion (GSMA Intelligence). Analysys Mason is more cau- tious: numbers will grow annually by about Every (forecast) picture tells a story a fifth to finish up at 5.3 billion in 2028. Who is right? Because no one agrees; connections shipments Latest forecasts about IoT connections vary wildly (see which is the trouble with crystal-gazing, below, left), and likely depend on how you count IoT; what is clear is the tracking sector is tipped for strong growth, and of course. Except there is consensus across cellular IoT and BLE will enjoy most of it. the stats and specs that it is going to be massive, and an argument to say it already 100% 217% is so. A billion is a billion, after all, and growth growth smartphone sales, by comparison, have - GSMA - Transforma 34% 142% stalled at about two percent growth per growth growth 32% 26% - ABI - ABI annum. Plus, the definition of ‘IoT-connect- growth growth 51% - ABI - ABI ed’ as directly-linked to the internet (IP) ex- growth cludes the whole IEEE 802.15.4 short-range - ABI sector. proprietary cellular positioning networking In particular, the in-building market is IoT Tracking LPWA BLE being riddled with low-energy Bluetooth (BLE) sensors at a faster-rate than the IoT sector is deploying gateways to carry their are networking ‘things’? There is a mad ar- Vodafone, which divides IoT in two: into payloads online. Look at the business be- ray of technologies in play, and boundaries tracking and monitoring. There is really ing done with Bluetooth in warehouses, are easily blurred; the terminology can be nothing else to it, it says. The discipline factories, and offices; its backers are shoot- stretched to cover the mass ‘sensorization’ grew out of connecting vehicles and vend- ing for 32 percent and 26 percent annual (eughh) of the broad enterprise sector. It is ing machines, and then smart meters, and growth on positioning and networking de- a jungle out there, and (the) jungle is mas- used to be called machine-to-machine vices in the period to 2024 – to over 1.5 bil- sive – as the old 1990s music scene would (M2M) communications; the difference is lion units, from zero a couple of years ago. tell us. low-power networking is being served by And what about Zigbee and Thread, and But what about asset tracking, to re- dedicated infrastructure, and costs have all the other short-range technologies that turn to the start? It’s a jungle, too. Just ask plummeted. 3 FEATURE REPORT Phil Skipper, head of global IoT business management in manufacturing, hospital development at Vodafone, comments: asset tracking, ATM remote tracking, and “With IoT, you basically want to know where freight monitoring. “Those are the ones the thing is, and what it’s doing – and one that come to mind. But if we are adamant, is achieved by asset tracking and the other we could probably list another dozen-or- by remote monitoring. So tracking is one so use cases that might also be considered of the two main applications for IoT, and asset tracking.” it’s one of the oldest. But it has tended to IDC calculates the IoT market was worth be limited to the high end, around either $685 billion in 2019, of which about 15 per- high-value items or high-value shipments, cent, or $86 billion, went on these six mar- with lots in the same container.” ket sub-segments. The total market will Anecdotally, analyst house IDC suggests grow at a compound rate of 11.3 percent as much as 80-90 percent of it can be re- per year in the period to 2024, the fore- duced to tracking. “I mean, if you’re consid- cast says; growth in these tracking ering workers as an asset, then you have disciplines will be lower in the pretty much everything covered,” com- same period, at 9.8 percent. ments Laszlo Toth, research manager at the 15% It is a big chunk, then, but firm. IDC breaks the IoT market down into – of the IoT market hardly a catch-all in this nar- is focused on 70-odd individual use cases, plus some six key asset rowed-down segmentation. “convenient others”; asset tracking, by it- tracking What gives? Because the self, does not feature. segments story is supposed to be that But, then, asset tracking is a parent cat- asset tracking is the great en- egory for a number of them. Toth reels off Moo-vement – animal tracking is one of IDC’s six core gine for IoT, which will propel the half a dozen: space management, agricul- tracking categories; monitoring farming supplies is a key sector to massive scale. Those statistics do ture and animal tagging, production asset focus for pharma firm Bayer (see below) not appear to tell that story, quite. Toth, The ‘table stakes’ for digital change harmaceuticals and life sciences “team that got Monsanto He adds: “Most of my IoT firm Bayer says it has asset track- and AWS built up in the IoT goes on raw materials into ing pretty well covered, by now. space”, he says. But its name the factory. The MES cap- Such fundamental IoT disciplines has changed, along with its tures them as they change Prepresent the ‘table stakes’ in the wider dig- remit, with the ‘IoT’ moni- state through the manufac- ital-change game, it reckons. ker dropped altogether. It turing, and our inventory Michael Swindler is in charge of Bayer’s is now called the ‘Connect management systems cap- operations platform, which effectively Team’. Swindler says: “We ture everything as they are translates to its entire supply chain. He are trying to expand now packaged and palletised, oversees the work of seven different teams, into AR/VR, wearables, and and our transportation sys- including the company’s ‘connected sup- all kinds of spaces beyond IoT. That’s the tem is enabled with GPS to track inventory ply chain’, which “goes over the top of scope of the platform.” as it goes into distribution. everything”, and gets regulated by ERP into IoT has become just another aspect of “On the inbound side, we actually slap de- its factories, MES on the floor, and mostly every-day business, he says.