Market research firm IDTechEx has poured scorn on the Internet of Things, claiming the concept is mostly just hype because real-world deployments and spending have reached only a small fraction of what many experts predicted.

In a new report,”Internet of Things (IoT) 2017-2027“, IDTechEx said that although companies spend billions of dollars on the IoT on an annual basis, the actual cost of buying and installing IoT networks is “much more modest,” in contrast to forecasts made by the vast majority of companies and experts in the past.

In particular, IDTechEx takes issue with ex-Ericsson Chief Executive Hans Vesterberg’s 2010 claim that there would be some “50 billion IoT devices” in the world by the year 2020, and says the reality is there will be nowhere near that number of devices.

“Our forecasts do not repeat the mantra about tens of billions of nodes being deployed in only a few years,” IDTechEx said in a statement. “The many analysts sticking to such euphoria ignore the fact that, contrary to their expectation, very little IoT was deployed in 2016. They are ‘bubble pushing’ with their forecasts, predicting ever steeper take-off to the point of physical impossibility. That is a triumph of hope over reality.”

Instead, IDTechEx has come up with its own, much more modest forecast of how many IoT devices there might be in 2020 – just over 1 billion.

Still, the analyst firm does concede there’s money to be made in the IoT. Though the market is still nascent at the moment, worth just $1 billion this year, it will explode to around $73 billion in 2018, eventually hitting $322 billion a year by 2027.

IDTechEx reckons the bulk of this money to be made will fall in the smart home/city and agricultural sectors. But the money won’t be found with IoT sensors, but rather with the systems, software and support that’s needed to put the IoT into action.

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