Telstra has reported almost 21 percent growth in the number of IoT services on its mobile network but only a 3.0 percent revenue growth.
In its FY21 annual results presentation last week Telstra reported a 20.8 percent increase in LTE-M (CAT-M1) and NB-IoT connections to 3.784 million, but revenue increased by only 3.0 percent to $209m.
Telstra also reported that its enterprise asset tracking product, Track and Monitor (launched in August 2018), grew its customer base by more than 300 percent.
Telstra has previously made bullish comments about the potential of IoT. In his announcement of Telstra’s FY18 half year results CEO Andy Penn IoT said IoT was a source of new growth and with revenues approaching $200m Telstra’s IoT business was “one of the most successful IoT businesses globally.”
At the launch of Telstra’s 2022 strategy in June 2018 Penn said: “We’ll grow our IoT business 30 percent this year. We’ll add 300,000 new SIOs. But importantly, we’re developing a range of exciting new solutions with our customers.”
In this year’s results announcement Telstra also talked up the future potential of CAT-M1 and NB-IoT in the 5G era, noting they had been formally recognised as 5G technologies by the mobile network standards body’s 3GPP.
“[This] means we can continue to support these technologies even beyond the lifespan of 4G,” Telstra said. “This will help drive an expansion of connected things and allow our customers to embrace LTE-M and Narrowband-IoT with confidence in their long-term future.”
Earlier this year Telstra announced that, with Ericsson it had extended the range of its NB-IoT network base stations to up to 120km. It said in its results announcement that this had increased the NB-IoT network footprint to nearly four million square kilometres.
