Vodafone is currently celebrating its feat of achieving 50 million connections for its Internet of Thing services. With this, it has become the first IoT mobile provider globally, to have achieved this mammoth numbers. According to the company’s blogpost, it is also demonstrating industry-leading growth of around one million new connections a month.
The company has particularly displayed strong performances in the automotive, healthcare and utilities sectors, in countries including India.
Vodafone uses the Group’s own operating networks, partner market networks and other third-party mobile network operators to provide customers with simple and globally unified IoT technologies and connected services, spread across nearly all the countries.
The company firmly believes that IoT technologies have now begun to reach critical masses as well as enterprises, where they are focusing on R&D for a wide range of customer technology companies.
According to the most recent Vodafone IoT Barometer report 76% of businesses say that IoT will be ‘critical’ for the future success of any organization in their sector. There other numbers suggested that 24% of IT businesses are being allocated to IoT, 48% of IoT adopters are using IoT to support large-scale business transformation and about 86% of businesses in the industrial sector have seen significant return from IoT implementation.
The Group is now acknowledged to be the market leader in mobile IoT worldwide and has been recognized by the Gartner as a ‘Leader’ in its Magic Quadrant for Managed M2M Services, Worldwide 2016, for the third consecutive year and as ‘the consistent global leader’ in IoT services by Machina Research in its 2016 IoT Communications Service Provider Benchmarking report.
It is also worth noting that since the inception of Vodafone’s machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies in 2011, it has experienced double-digit annual growth in IoT revenue.
Vodafone Director of IoT Ivo Rook said “Vodafone was one of the earliest believers in the potential for the Internet of Things to transform business and life. The 50 million milestone is a testament to our continued focus and commitment to innovation in this rapidly growing and dynamic sector.”
Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries, partners with mobile networks in 49 more, and fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. Vodafone had 470 million mobile customers and 14.3 million fixed broadband customers as of 31 December 2016.
