The hidden face of the IoT (Internet of Things)
Cisco regularly publishes its forecasts for the future of global Internet traffic, highlighting the disparities between countries: while the percentage of Internet users will rise from 44% to 58% of the global population in 2021, it will barely reach 27% in Africa (excluding South Africa), compared with 87% in Western Europe and 92% in France.
Among this sea of figures, there are a few indicators to remember, such as the number of terminals per user, which in our country will rise from 5.1 - which is already very high - to 8.7, still in 4 years' time: how is this possible? One mobile, one PC, one TV, one tablet, one watch per person... and what else?
In fact, these new terminals will communicate... without us: this is the famous M2M - for Machine to Machine.
Already today, M2M terminals account for 43% of all connected devices - a figure set to rise to 63% by 2021 - in our country alone; at global level, similar growth from 34% to 51% - but only from 16% to 27% in Africa.
51% of M2M terminals for the planet in 4 years... but only 5% of IP traffic, i.e. barely 1 GB per month: compare this to the 15 GB of a smartphone or the 55 GB of a PC, or even the 16 GB of a connected TV.
Does this mean that the proliferation of connected objects is not accompanied by a parallel rise in usage? No, it's just that machines are not as greedy as humans: they don't consume streaming video, they just exchange data.
Just a few pieces of data to inform a waiter that an elderly person is in good health at home, to check that the boiler in his country house is frost-free, that the oil in his car doesn't need changing, and so on.
So much information that machines will soon know more about us and our loved ones... than we do ourselves! Adwise knows this.
While the future of the Internet for humans will involve more bandwidth and greater speed - from 25 to 65 Mbps for us - the future of machines will be more parsimonious in this respect. The fact remains, however, that data will be accumulating in the cloud, along with all our dear little secrets...
