INTERVIEW: Mats Lundquist, CEO of Telenor Connexion (pictured), believes digital health remains a long-term play for IoT service providers, with the bulk of near-term growth likely to continue to be fuelled by automotive applications.

The health sector is currently heavily regulated not only at a national level but also regionally within countries, Lundquist noted: “It’s slowly coming along,” he told Mobile World Live, adding the IoT operator is working with medical technology companies to ensure it is in a position to capitalise on the “enormous” long-term potential of the sector.

For the time being, though, connected cars and trucks are “the most advanced, most mature” and “fastest growing” area of IoT, though Lundquist said other growth markets include “utilities in smart cities and, increasingly, industrial manufacturing”.

Telenor Connexion is the “international IoT company of the Telenor Group,” the executive explained. Lundquist said “relatively immature” markets including Pakistan and Bangladesh offer the company “tremendous opportunities to create”: today it is offering services covering fleet management and agriculture in those markets.

Lundquist explained existing 2G, 3G and 4G technologies are sufficient for the IoT services Telenor Connexion currently offers, but said 5G will be necessary for NB-IoT “because then we get into new use cases, with different cost structures, longer battery lifetimes and also a different coverage”.

During the interview, Lundquist also explained why IoT is not necessarily a new concept, but is today being adapted to cover emerging use cases involving urbanisation and the digitalisation of industries. Click here for more.