‘Internet will have 19 trillion connected devices in the coming next two decades’

There will be 19 trillion devices connected to the Internet — 14 trillion in private sector and around 5 trillion in public sector — in the coming two decades, according to a top executive at the US-based Cisco.
Wim Elfrink, executive vice president, told Arab News in an exclusive interview recently that there is an explosion in terms of volume of devices.
“This will ease everything and provide jobs to many young people,” he said. “The first phase was about connectivity, the second was about e-commerce, enabling businesses to trade online, we are now very heavily in social networks, in the next decades we have to go into Internet for everything.”
Elfrink, who was among major speakers at the recent Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF-2014), said the key benefit of a Smart+Connected Communities (S+CC) is overall sustainability. Economic sustainability creates jobs, boosts key industries, and attracts new businesses. In term of social sustainability, it provides services to enhance citizens’ quality of life and social inclusion.
There is also environmental sustainability that reduces environmental impact and creates a greener society, of which the King Abdullah Financial District is an example.
Today there are an estimated 10 billion devises connected to the Internet that will increase to 50 billion in the next decades, he said, and added that around 30 billion devices are connected to the Internet every week. “It is an explosion of things, you have tablets, smartphones even a device to monitor your health. So things are exploding and generating big data and as such people need to be connected. We have to build capability and educate the people,” he added
He said that from a demographic point of view in Saudi Arabia there are young people who are very active in ICT. There are a lot of new revenue and job opportunities.
In February 2009, Cisco unveiled its holistic blueprint for S+CC, a global initiative using the network as the platform to transform physical communities to connected communities that run on networked information to enable economic, social and environmental sustainability.
He said Cisco envisions that the principles that have made the Internet a thriving ecosystem over the past 20 years can be applied to create and grow the networked platform for connecting people with products, services and information.
This same network would also provide a means for cities to manage services, provide citywide information, gather knowledge on how citizens use managed services and provide business opportunities as well.
Together with an ecosystem of partners, Cisco has created a powerful, integrated platform that incorporates top technology, applications and business models to improve the way communities and cities are designed, built and run — from lighting to waste management, from parking and traffic services to safety and security.
Elfrink said Cisco’s strategy to address the needs of cities today and into the future is to leverage the network as the foundation for managed city and business services that incorporate all manners of mobility, security, cloud computing, virtualization, collaboration and video and rely on cross functional, open architecture applications that run on this foundation layer.