streetlight management, video surveillance and environmental monitoring. Using application-specific networks, though, can increase costs and reduce the opportunity to improve security and reliability when compared with multi-purpose networks47. Where mobile phone network coverage is available, 2G and 3G networks can be used for most IoT applications. The increasing coverage of 4G cellular networks, meanwhile, provides a high-throughput and low-latency option for higher-value IoT applications such as video surveillance.The development of 5G cellular networks, expected to be deployed in the early 2020s, will provide considerable benefits for IoT applications, especially high-bandwidth ones such as video sharing. It will bring significant improvements in wireless communications, using smart radios and spectrum-sharing with 1,000 times higher spectral efficiency than current standards. 5G will support cooperative relays and femtocells, enabling low-power sensors to communicate farther while reducing the possibility of interference between communicating devices. It will include specific features to support device-to-device communication (such as traffic offloading) and explicit support for IoT/M2M systems48. The industry association GSMA identifies sub-1ms latency and greater than 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) bandwidth as defining features of 5G. Many of the other 5G goals can be met gradually using existing protocols. Meanwhile, autonomous driving, augmented-reality and virtual-reality systems, and tactile Internet interfaces are the main technologies today that would require such low latency and high throughput. These could be used in gaming, telemedicine and manufacturing49.5G likely will also support Software Defined Networking, allowing operators to run production and test networks over existing physical networks. These will feature separate IP control and data planes, increasing security while reducing expenditures. And it could provide support for running cloud computing in core networks, moving analytics closer to IoT edge devices50. SDN and femtocells are already being deployed in some 4G networks.When a company such as a smart meter operator is managing thousands or millions of M2M devices via mobile data networks, they have very different requirements from a typical mobile telephone customer. They need comprehensive network status information to determine whether a non-communicating device or its network connection is faulty. They want a single subscription for the whole system, not on a per-device basis. And in many cases, the intended device lifetime will be much longer than the time during which individuals typically own a mobile phone – perhaps a decade or more. Replacing a device -- or even a communications module within it -- will require either an expensive service visit or a complicated process for customers that may cause faults. Not all mobile network operators can yet cope with these requirements, although many have set up business units specifically to address them51.IoT systems are built on fixed and wireless communications standards, but it can still be difficult to connect systems in different industry sectors or to reuse system components. The great heterogeneity in application programming interfaces and middleware (software components) makes it difficult to write applications that will run on different systems. So, users often have to rely on a single set of applications for a single set of IoT components. More standardization would enable more innovation, allowing information to flow between different industry sectors such as consumer electronics and automobiles. There is a need for interoperability, connectivity, access control, service discovery, and privacy services, all built on IoT-optimized protocols where necessary52. Greater configurability allows components to be used in a wider variety of systems, but it can increase complexity and price.Because IoT applications have strongly heterogeneous requirements, there is a need to fit different communications protocols to different applications – for example, using IoT-specific protocols such as the Constrained Access Protocol (CoAP) in resource-constrained systems. Most applications will be built around Internet Protocol, except on very constrained devices. M2M devices can connect directly to other machines, but frequently there are gateways connecting IoT devices, which provide added-value services such as protocol conversion, filtering, caching, and back-end hubs – which can run on smart phones, gateways, or in the cloud (for global scale)53. Even if integration of infrastructure and networks can prove challenging between organizations 80 Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2016