Top 7 Japan Wireless IoT Predictions for 2020（国内ワイヤレスIoT市場における2020年の7つの予測）

IoT adoption continued to advance in Japan in 2019 as, according to a recent ITR survey, 94% of large domestic enterprises using IoT in their business with at least 10 billion yen in revenue and 50 employees will continue to develop IoT solutions. And while the market will continue to develop in 2020, several new wireless technologies will accelerate the speed of adoption and the sophistication of the services being deployed both in terms of hardware and software. According to a recent IoT survey, 33% of Japanese enterprises plan to use Wi-Fi, 43% plan to use cellular connectivity and 18% plan to use LPWA in IoT deployments in the next three years, and as these technologies mature, they will feature more robust capabilities. Furthermore, new IT vendor offerings based on these new technologies will give Japanese enterprises new options to increase efficiency and lower operational costs using IoT. 

“Intelligent Edge” Becomes the New Driver for IoT

Perhaps the largest trend in the wireless IoT market in 2020 will be the continued development of edge computing as data processing will be pushed out further toward the network edge. Telecom carriers in Japan will deploy cloudlets in locations closer to end-users which will lower latency and enable new use cases. Eventually, a new generation of IoT sensors, which will process data on devices as opposed to in a datacenter, will be introduced to the market which will both lower latency and reduce the traffic volume that datacenters need to process. Classic use cases such as manufacturing, retail, and transportation will continue to be discussed, but new ones will also be introduced, such as using edge computing for privacy in smart city and smart home applications.