Ericsson Mobility Report announced that the number of IoT devices will increase at a CAGR of 21 percent between 2016 and 2022.

There will be 1.5 billion IoT devices with cellular connections by 2022, said Ericsson.

Several mobile operators are expected to deploy cellular IoT networks based on Cat-M1 and Narrow Band-IoT (NB-IoT) in 2017.

There will be around 29 billion connected devices by 2022 including around 18 billion related to IoT. Connected IoT devices include connected cars, machines, meters, sensors, point-of-sales terminals, consumer electronics and wearables.

The short-range segment of IoT consists of devices connected by unlicensed radio technologies, with a typical range of up to 100 meters, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee. This category also includes devices connected over fixed-line local area networks and powerline technologies.

The wide-area segment of IoT consists of devices using cellular connections, as well as unlicensed low-power technologies, such as Sigfox, LoRa and RPMA. Presently, the dominating technology in this segment is GSM/GPRS.

Ericsson said the number of IoT devices with cellular connectivity will reach 1.5 billion in 2022, or around 70 percent of the wide-area category, from 0.4 billion IoT devices with cellular connections in 2016.

Declining modem costs, evolving LTE functionality and 5G capabilities are expected to extend the range of applications for critical IoT deployments.