For more than one year we have heard it over and over again: Ericsson envisions there will be 50 billion connected devices on Earth by 2020.

Some people have changed the statement slightly to “fifty billion connections”. Most people might be confused by these statements. When we transfer a ring tone from one mobile phone to another using Bluetooth, the two devices are connected. Is this kind of connection included in Ericsson’s estimate?

Last week, I had an exclusive interview with Ericsson’s new CEO, Hans Vestberg, who was in Jakarta for less than 24 hours to meet with Ericsson customers. Hans took over from Carl-Henrik Svanberg, who, if you recall, left Ericsson to become the chairman of British Petroleum’s board of directors last year.

Hans was accompanied by Arun Bansal, Ericsson’s head of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Here is a summary of the interview:

Question: Are you talking about 50 billion connections or 50 connected devices?

Answer: We actually mean 50 billion connected devices. When we talk about connected devices — and not just connections, we mean devices that connect to each other using wireless mobile networks, Internet broadband, Wi-Fi, etc.. They comprise not only mobile phone connections but include machine-to-machine connections. For example, they will include mobile health kits that are being tested in certain areas in Africa where transportation is a huge challenge. These devices will perform blood tests on patients, for example, and send the results to a hospital hundreds of kilometers away for a diagnosis.

Doctors will then be able to SMS their suggestions for a cure. We are not talking about devices that talk to each other using technologies such as Bluetooth and RFID, although most of the mobile chips today have Bluetooth capability built-in. If we included Bluetooth and RFID, the 50 billion figure would be far too low.

How did Ericsson come up with the 50 billion figure?

There has been a revolution in the (technology) industry in the past five or ten years. As a result, last
May the number of mobile phone subscribers in the world passed the five billion mark. Eighty five percent of the world’s population is now covered.

Today, it is also estimated that 700 million people already have broadband connections. Add to these the machine-to-machine connections that are already happening today, for example, in high-end cars.

The revolution is definitely going to continue, and I certainly have seen a lot more progress today than last year when we first talked about the vision. If we project the numbers for ten years into the future, the ballpark figure of 50 billion connected devices will make sense.

If there are so many devices on the network, do you think the network will be capable of assigning a unique address to each of them so that, for example, my heart monitoring device will talk to the machine in the hospital instead of the engine diagnostics in a car repair shop?

Few of us would have expected a couple of years ago that there would be five billion mobile phone subscribers today. But somehow the network found a way to cope. So there will be different types of solutions, some are complex but others are very simple. For instance, as there will be devices that carry time-sensitive information and there are devices that can send their information five minutes later, those such as the meter reading devices for household gas consumption may use the Internet while devices carrying time-critical information such as logistics will get the priority and use a faster access method.

People have been talking about applications that take advantage of device-to-device connections in the areas of health, education, trade, finance and many others. Can you suggest an application people have not thought about?

In Northern Sweden, there are hundred and hundred miles of roads with lights on at night. Yet you can drive for hours at night without bumping into another motorist. It’s a waste of energy.

We could connect the lamp poles to cameras, and the lamps would only light up if the cameras tell them a vehicle is approaching. When there is no vehicle, the lamps are automatically turned off.

So, the use of device-to-device connection can also have direct impact on energy saving?

Absolutely. Applications such as mHealth are also being tested in Sweden. It is not limited only to certain places like Africa, Latin America and Asia where road infrastructure is not widely available.

Tailored to local needs, they will also be applicable in developed countries as well.

Keep in mind that the world’s GDP is estimated to increase three folds by 2020, so we would need three times as much road infrastructure, etc. Not only will it be difficult to achieve, but it will be harmful to the environment, In developed countries, applications such as mHealth will ease traffic in the cities and lower CO2 emissions.

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