The worldwide government Internet of Things (IoT) endpoint electronics and communications market will total $21.3 billion in 2022, according to Gartner, Inc. This is a 22% increase from a forecasted total of $17.5 billion in 2021.
“Local governments worldwide are increasingly using IoT technology to monitor their infrastructure and assets more effectively and improve citizens’ safety and living environments, including controlling the spread of COVID-19 and checking quarantine compliance,” said Kay Sharpington, senior principal research analyst at Gartner. “In addition, the falling costs of devices are contributing to the financial viability of projects that utilize outdoor surveillance cameras and city asset tracking.”
“Over the past year, the role of cameras has expanded into checking for social distancing and mask wearing to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as increased use for contactless parking management,” said Sharpington. “Their adoption will continue to increase at a different pace across regions as data privacy regulations vary across countries. For example, the Chinese government does not have the same restrictions as Western Europe and North America so it will be a key contributor to growth, using cameras that harness advanced image recognition and video analytics techniques.”
As 5G is well-suited to video applications due to its high data throughput, Gartner estimates that outdoor surveillance cameras will represent over 75% of the government’s global 5G connections through 2022.
In addition, Gartner estimates that 39% of global government endpoints will be shipped with a low-power wide-area (LPWA) interface in 2022, up from 26% in 2020.
LPWA technologies offer WAN and mobile connectivity at significantly lower prices than traditional cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) networks. Their long battery life means devices are well-suited to urban applications because many have relatively low-bandwidth requirements. LPWA networks will continue to displace existing networking technologies for metering and streetlight monitoring and create new IoT solutions for parking, waste management, road traffic management and much more.
