What devices will be connected in 2030 and how? Could it really be 500 billion?
Getting the next innovation right is not child’s play. First, it takes understanding that invention and innovation are not the same thing. Invention happens in the brain or in a lab. Innovation takes place one user at a time and requires a certain critical mass, especially for products that are network based or involve changes in behavior. The Internet started in the late 1960s and didn’t reach 10 million users until 25 years later. It took file transfer protocols, IP addresses, a tricky browser, and so on, including 1.6 billion websites (99% of them since 2000) for it to reach today’s mega innovation status.
So which will succeed first—the Quad Play, wearable apps (the post VR glasses kind), universal passwords or something else? Starting with wearables, over 300 million were shipped globally in 2019, in part because “hearables” (including headphones) were added to the category and in part because of Apple’s surging Watch. Overall, the market is projected to grow about 20% a year, with Apple leading the way, followed by Xiaomi, Huawei and Fitbit (being acquired by Google for $2.1 billion). Quad Play, by contrast, has fewer than fifty million global subscribers but is growing at a faster clip, in part due to a decline in Triple Play subscribers caused by the influx of streaming choices and dropping of fixed voice.
Quad Play first appeared in Singapore and Spain, while France and Portugal have the highest shares of Quad subscribers today. In the United States, Comcast has managed to secure about two million quads by combining its growing hotspot network with an MVNO position on Verizon’s mobile service. The next step by Comcast and the other cable TV operators will be to win their own spectrum in upcoming spectrum auctions, while offering their own video streaming (“Peacock” in Comcast’s case) to retain the subscribers they have (which in Comcast’s case will receive the streaming option at a 50% discount to what Peacock-only subscribers will pay). In Germany, one of the fastest growing markets for Quad Play, Vodafone is leading the way, combining its mobile subscribers with its video ones, having acquired the largest cable TV operator in 2013.
A major limitation of the quad bundle is its household-oriented sales approach when most users buy the mobile component as individuals and not as households. A recession could change all this, as price becomes a more critical factor than it already is. That said, wearables could surge even more if suddenly they were to offer key smartphone functions such as texting, voice calls, GPS and tracking the wearer’s health without having to be in blue tooth range of an actual smartphone—and containing a pico-battery for powering the calls. For the non-poly app users, this would leave fewer reasons to have a smartphone, apart from those selfies. (Another wearables advantage, in a world where crowd behavior prevails, is we see them more easily than we hear about people signing up for Quad Play.)
And not to be overlooked is the possible role of regulators. They could intervene to limit unfair bundling subsidies or to reduce the privacy risks of data bases that literally store our heartbeats. In either case, a few billion wearables or a few hundred million Quad Play subscriptions could materialize by 2030. The chances of either happening are greater than having 500 billion connectable devices installed by then, even if each one costs just $20 to install and activate (totaling a mere $10 trillion). But so are the chances that what takes the world by storm by January 2030 is none of the above.