One of the more interesting predictions in the latest Cisco annual internet forecast is that there will be more machine-to-machine (M2M) connections on the Internet by 2021 than there are people using smartphones, desktops, laptops and tablets.

Today there are a little over 11 billion human-used machines connected to the Internet. That number is growing steadily and Cisco predicts that by 2021 there will be over 13 billion such devices using the Internet. That prediction also assumes that total users on the internet will grow from a worldwide 44% broadband penetration in 2016 to a 58% worldwide penetration of people that have connectivity to the Internet by 2021.

But the use of M2M devices is expected to grow a lot faster. There are fewer than 6 billion such devices in use today and Cisco is projecting that will grow to nearly 14 billion by 2021.

So what is machine-to-machine communication? Broadly speaking it is any technology that allows networked devices to exchange information and perform actions without assistance from humans. This encompasses a huge range of different devices including:

• Cloud data center. When something is stored in the cloud, most cloud services create duplicate copies of data at multiple data centers to protect against a failure at any given data center. While this does not represent a huge number of devices when measured on the scale of billions, the volume of traffic between data centers is gigantic.
• Telemetry. Telemetry has been around since before the Internet. Telemetry includes devices that monitor and transmit operational data from field locations of businesses, with the most common examples being devices that monitor the performance of electric networks and water systems. But the devices used for telemetry will grow rapidly as our existing utility grids are upgraded to become smart grids and when telemetry is used by farmers to monitor crops and animals, used to monitor wind and solar farms, and used to monitor wildlife and many other things in the environment.
• Home Internet of Things. Much of the growth of devices will come from an explosion of devices used for the Internet of Things. In the consumer market that will include all of the smart devices we put into homes such as burglar alarms, cameras, smart door locks and smart appliances of many kinds.
• Business IoT. There is expected to be an even greater proliferation of IoT devices for businesses. For example, modern factories that include robots are expected to have numerous devices that monitor and direct the performance of machines. Hospitals are expected to replace wires with wireless networked devices used to monitor patients. Retail stores are all investigating devices that track customers through the store to assist in shopping and to offer inducements to purchase.
• Smart Cars and Trucks. By 2021 it’s expected that most new cars and trucks will routinely communicate with the Internet. This does not necessarily imply self-driving vehicles, but rather that all new vehicles will have M2M capabilities.
• Smart Cities. A number of large cities are looking to improve living conditions using smart city technologies. This is going to require the deployment of huge numbers of sensors that will be used to improve things like traffic flow, monitoring for crimes and improvement everyday things like garbage collection and snow removal.
• Wearables. Today there are huge numbers of fitness monitors, but it’s expected that it will become routine for people to wear health monitors of various types that keep track of vital statistics and monitor to catch problems at an early stage.
• Gray Areas. There are also a lot of machine-to-machine communications that come from computers, laptops and smartphones. I see that my phone uses data even at those times when I’m not using it. Our devices now query the cloud to look for updates, to make back-ups of our data or to take care of other tasks that our apps do in the background without our knowledge or active participation.

Of course, having more machine-to-machine devices doesn’t mean that this traffic will grow to dominate web traffic. Cisco predicts that by 2021 that 83% of the traffic on the web will be video of some sort. While most of that video will be used for entertainment, it will also include huge piles of broadband usage for surveillance cameras and other video sources.

If you are interested in M2M developments I recommend M2M: Machine2Machine Magazine. This magazine contains hundreds of articles on the various fields of M2M communications.