By the end of 2018, half the African population will be covered by LTE networks, as LTE base station deployment swells at a CAGR of 40 percent over the next five years, finds ABI Research.

The smart home appliance market, defined by products with built-in connectivity, will witness substantial growth over the next five years, reaching nearly $25bn by 2018, according to ABI Research. Currently limited to the top-end luxury models, wireless connectivity will slowly permeate to lower tier brands and models.

ABI Research forecasts that the M2M analytics industry will grow a robust 53.1% over the next 5 years from $1.9bn in 2013 to $14.3bn in 2018. The forecast includes revenue segmentation for the five components that together enable analytics to be used in M2M services: data integration, data storage, core analytics, data presentation, and associated professional services.

ABI Research forecasts that revenues in the commercial fleet telematics market will increase from $7.25bn in 2012 to reach a total of $26.8bn in 2018, with North America closely followed by the Asia-Pacific region as the largest markets and Western Europe in third position.

The installed base of Bluetooth-enabled devices alone reached 3.5 billion in 2012 and is forecast to grow to almost 10 billion by 2018"”with not even taking into account many other technologies, such as Wi-Fi, ZigBee and cellular, according to ABI Research.