Driven by the rise in integrated infotainment systems in vehicles and rising adoption of consumer IoT services that rely on 5G connections, data traffic from cellular IoT connections is expected to rise to 218.6 exabytes by 2035, according to new data from market research firm Omdia.
Of this, 61.9% of the market will be represented by automotive data traffic, which is forecasted to grow to 135.4 EB by 2035, up from 30.7 EB in 2025. That’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% over the 10-year period.
Among automotive cellular IoT data traffic, infotainment services like video and audio streaming as well as firmware over-the-air updates will be the key consumers of this data traffic, Omdia said. Transport and logistics are poised to become the next major sector for cellular IoT data traffic with the other sectors combined contributing less than 29% of the total traffic beyond 2025.
“The rising number of vehicles with smart features, particularly infotainment, will cause cellular IoT data traffic to boom over the next decade,” said Alexander Thompson, senior analyst for IoT at Omdia. “Other video-based use cases will also generate significant amounts of data.”
Omdia said emerging trends like machine vision for cameras in robots and industrial machinery as well as agentic AI will drive growth in peer-to-peer machine traffic. This will increase demand for data traffic at the edge and accelerate 5G adoption.
“Together, these trends are creating additional data traffic demand that did not exist several years ago," said Andrew Brown, practice lead for IoT at Omdia.
