How Big Is the Internet of Things? How Big Will It Get?

New information technologies have transformed world politics, and not always for the better. Even trying to understand how technology connects us reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet. To understand what the Internet is becoming, let's start with some basic questions--how big is it and how big will it get? The best estimates now say there will be almost 50 billion devices by 2020.






The next time someone reboots those infected devices, the bots will be ready to start commandeering them. The botnet that Carna exposed could be very destructive if it is ever used, and some might even see her as a threat because the census taker was fooling around with the world's device networks. Still, in exposing these dark secrets, Carna revealed a lot about what our Internet is becoming. If a credible census from 2012 revealed 1.3 billion devices with an address on the Internet, what are the projections for the years ahead? In tomorrow's post I will attempt to find an answer.

The Internet of Things is hard to track. As I point out in Pax Technica, what makes it hard to estimate the size of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the fact that the addressing system for devices is changing. The Carna Bot found 1.3 billion devices with an IPv4 address in 2012. Engineers expect so many of these connected devices that they have reconfigured the addressing system to allow for 2 to the 128th power addresses-enough for each atom on the face of the earth to have 100 Internet addresses.

The IoT is developing now because we've figured out how to give everything we produce an address, we have enough bandwidth to allow device-to-device communications, and we have the capacity to store all the data those exchanges create.


Figure 1:  How big is the Internet of Things, and How Big Will it Get?

There are over 30 different sources--from full on commissioned research reports to vague press releases--about how the Internet of Things is growing. It is hard to get a consistent punchline from all the different ways of counting the Internet of Things, but the figure below puts all the estimates together so we can at least see what the trend line might be. In the absence of good consistent census data, evaluating, and reconciling estimates is the next best way to think about the most plausible trend lines. The figure includes two trend lines, one for the count of the human population on the planet and one of the count of the population of connected devices. The projections go through to the year 2025 and the counts are in billions. Human population data is from the "medium scenario" of the latest UN Population revision.

The figure includes two milestones. The first is the year the "Internet of Things" was coined as a term--1998. The figure also reveals the crossover point between the two trend lines. This second milestone is around 2014, and it marks the point at which the number of devices communicating with each other surpassed the number of people communicating with each other.


These numbers vary greatly. Gartner always speaks of the "installed base" to distinguish between the number of chips that get made and the number that are actually embedded into objects and shipped out to consumers. Some numbers are specific to consumer electronics or smart meters. Some reports simply refer to human made objects embedded with chips.

