The news comes following the launch of the sixteenth edition of TMT Predictions 2017.
No more getting lost, indoors
Deloitte predicts that one in 20 uses of digital navigation in 2017 will be indoors. By 2022, at least a quarter of all human and machine uses of precision digital navigation will include an indoor leg or be for an entirely indoor journey. With every year, getting lost indoors will get increasingly harder.
The growth of indoor navigation will be boosted by the growing availability of an array of indoor positioning data and improvements in the accuracy of data generated by beacons, Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular base stations. Advanced analytical tools will be required to interpret multiple location datasets in parallel in order to produce high-quality location.
Precise indoor navigation’s potential is significant, and could be transformative. It is likely to benefit most vertical sectors, impacting government, business and consumers alike. Indoor navigation is also likely to be used for people and things, to locate rapidly items of value in a range of locations, from tools in a workshop, goods in a warehouse, parts on a factory floor, to suitcases in the hold of a plane.
Ed Shedd, head of technology, media and telecommunications at Deloitte comments: “We are all aware of the impact that satellite-based digital navigation, including the digitisation of street maps, has had on our daily way of living, and on business models.
“However, satellite navigation has one fundamental blind spot – its signals are often too weak to penetrate building roofs. Yet people spend over 90% of their time indoors. Billions of objects, from vehicles to tools to components, all of which may need to be located, are housed somewhere under a roof.
“Being able to locate people and objects when indoors is likely to add significant value, possibly at a level equivalent to or greater than the impact that outdoor digital navigation has had.”
Cyberattacks enter the Terabit Era
Deloitte also predicts that in 2017 Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, a form of cyberattack, will become larger in scale, harder to mitigate, and more frequent. Deloitte expects there will be on average a terabit/s (Tbit/s) attack per month and over 10 million attacks in total during the year. The average attack size will be between 1.25 and 1.5 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) of junk data being sent. An unmitigated Gbit/s attack (one whose impact was not contained), would be sufficient to take many organisations offline.
Phill Everson, UK head of cyber risk services at Deloitte, comments: “This escalation in the DDoS threat is largely due to the growing number of vulnerable IoT devices and online availability of IOT-focused malware (both of which allow relatively unskilled attackers to hijack IoT devices and use them to launch attacks), as well as access to ever higher bandwidth speeds.
“Businesses of all sizes should acknowledge the growing DDOS threat and consider how best to handle attacks of these magnitudes.”
Have we passed peak tablet?
Deloitte predicts that global sales of tablets in 2017 will be fewer than 165 million units, down by approximately 10% from the 182 million units sold in 2016. The fall, whilst modest, suggests that demand for the tablet – once regarded as the ‘Goldilocks’ device, being just the right size – has peaked, particularly after shipping more than 200 million units annually in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
Furthermore, Deloitte predicts that the most recent level of shipments suggests that household adoption of these devices may also be plateauing, and at a substantially lower level than for other consumer electronic devices.
In terms of UK market penetration, 63% of adults have access to a tablet, while smartphone penetration is at 81%, and 95% have access to a desktop or laptop computer. More than a quarter (27%) of consumers are likely to buy a new smartphone in the next 12 months, and 24% intend to buy a new computer this year. By contrast, the figure for tablets was only 15%.
The notion of a slowdown in tablet adoption is further enforced by the fact that the lifetime of tablet devices is seemingly extending. According to Deloitte’s analysis of UK data, only 38% of tablets were bought in 2015 or 2016. More than half were pre-2015 models and more than a quarter more than three years old.
Julian Rae, TMT Partner at Deloitte in Cambridge (pictured) comments: “The tablet has been one of the most successful consumer products of all time, one of the fastest-adopted and is now in the vast majority of UK homes.
“However, in terms of the preferred devices for various activities, there are three consumer devices that are leading tablets by a large margin: TVs, smartphones, and computers. It seems unlikely that the tablet will ever displace these devices, although it will remain more ubiquitous than other recent devices, such as smart watches and fitness bands.
“With smartphones becoming larger and more powerful, and our research showing that millennials typically prefer laptops to tablets, it seems that the tablet may be getting harder to swallow for consumers.”
The 2017 series of TMT Predictions is the 16th edition of the report and has drawn on internal and external inputs from thousands of conversations with member firm clients and contributions from Deloitte member firms’ partners and managers specialising in TMT, and discussions with industry analysts as well as interviews with leading executives from around the world and proprietary quantitative research.
Read about Deloitte’s TMT Predictions 2017.
Read about Deloitte’s predictions for the Telecommunications and Media sectors in 2017.
About Deloitte
In this press release references to Deloitte are references to Deloitte LLP, which is among the country's leading professional services firms.
Deloitte LLP is the United Kingdom member firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”), a UK private company limited by guarantee, whose member firms are legally separate and independent entities. Please see www.deloitte.co.uk/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of DTTL and its member firms.
The information contained in this press release is correct at the time of going to press.
For more information, please visit www.deloitte.co.uk
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