The increased adoption of connected devices across both industry and government has seen the number of cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) connections surge dramatically over the past 5 years – boosted by falling hardware and connectivity costs, as well as the  increased rollout of cellular technologies like Narrowband-IoT, LTE-M and 5G.

According to the latest data published by MEF, cellular M2M connections totalled 3.76 billion at the end of 2024, growth of 110% from 1.79 billion end-2020, with 3 billion (nearly 80% of total connections) currently found across the Asia Pacific region.

Europe counted almost 362 million cellular M2M connections end-2024, followed by the Americas with 316 million, and Middle East & Africa with almost 85 million. Growth over the 5-year period was highest in MEA (170%) – admittedly from a low base, with AsiaPac up 120%, and Europe and the Americas both nearing 70% growth.

All this data and more is now available to download from mef.mobi and click on MEF Data.