The world’s largest 300 cellular IoT deployments account for a combined 156 million subscriptions, M2M research company Berg Insight announced.

According to the company’s IoT market research report, the top 300 projects accounted for 39 per cent of the world’s IoT connections at end-2016. The analyst house expects the number of connections from these initiatives to grow to 344.5 million units by 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of over 17 per cent.

Sectors with the largest number of projects registered in the top 300 were fleet management and mobile resource management, followed by retail. A significant number of automotive and smart home-focused deployments also made Berg Insight’s list.

In terms of vertical sectors with the greatest number of subscriptions, OEM automotive was found to have the most individual connections registered, accounting for around 30 million units, ahead of utilities with close to 27.6 million.

Berg Insight senior analyst Rickard Andersson said: “More than 30 deployments on the list have surpassed 1 million subscriptions and the top-ten projects alone account for over 60 million units.”

Infrastructure boost
Forecasts of growth in cellular IoT devices come as operators around the world continue to increase their network footprints to cater for the new traffic.

In May AT&T joined Verizon in unveiling its US-wide LTE-M network, while last week Vodafone reaffirmed a commitment to deploy an NB-IoT network in the Netherlands after it had already completed deployment in cities elsewhere in Europe.