Image © Christoph Scholz used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
Cisco says IPv6 adoption is enabling IoT connectivity. “The transition from an IPv4 environment to an IPv6 environment is making excellent progress, with increases in IPv6 device capabilities, content enablement, and operators implementing IPv6 in their networks.”
A few years ago IPv6 was in the news, amid dire predictions about the imminent exhaustion of the pool of IPv4 addresses. Things have gone quiet of late, but IPv6 adoption is far from widespread. Google estimated at the start of this year that IPv6 accounted for only 10 percent of addresses.
Cisco in the latest edition of its Visual Networking Index, Forecast & Trends 2017-2022, estimates that globally there will be nearly 18.3 billion IPv6-capable fixed and mobile devices by 2022, up from nearly six billion in 2017, a CAGR of 26 percent, and 64 percent of all fixed and mobile networked devices will be IPv6-capable by 2022, up from 32 percent in 2017.
However, it adds: “This estimate is based on the capability of the device and the network connection to support IPv6 and is not a projection of active IPv6 connections.”
IoT today, according to Cisco “is no longer a phenomenon, but it has become a prevalent system in which people, processes, data, and things connect to the Internet and each other.”
A major driver of IoT, Cisco says, is machine to machine communication and devices. “Globally, M2M connections will grow 2.4-fold, from 6.1 billion in 2017 to 14.6 billion by 2022 [and] there will be 1.8 M2M connections for each member of the global population by 2022.”
Almost half of these connections will be for home applications, such as home automation, home security and video surveillance, connected white goods, and tracking applications, 48 percent of the total by 2022.
Connected car, with applications such as fleet management, in-vehicle entertainment and Internet access, roadside assistance, vehicle diagnostics, navigation, and autonomous driving, will be the fastest-growing industry segment, at a 28 percent CAGR. Connected cities applications will have the second-fastest growth, at a 26 percent CAGR each.
Overall Cisco is tipping a 2.4 fold increase in the number of M2M connections to 14.6 billion by 2022, but says M2M traffic will jump sevenfold to account for six percent of total IP traffic.
However Cisco does not seem to make any distinction between M2M devices and M2M traffic and overall IoT devices and traffic. Elsewhere in the VNI it says IoT connections will represent more than half (14.6 billion) of all global connected devices and connections (28.5 billion) by 2022, and will represent more than six percent of global IP traffic by 2022.
