There isn't a lot of money in connecting a smart meter or a bit of factory equipment. Pumping mobile data to yuppie owners of Apple's iPhone X is far more lucrative for telcos. But while iPhone-less yuppies are in relatively short supply, there are countless machines and objects that still lack connectivity. With the sheer volume of business, it shouldn't matter if a connection costs less than a Primark T-shirt. Service providers can still profit. (See Overpriced & Underwhelming, Apple's New iPhone Lacks X Factor.)

This logic is almost sacrosanct in the industry, and so operators scouring the details of Ericsson's mobility reports must feel rather alarmed. In keeping with industry opinion, the latest report, published this week, does forecast an Internet of Things (IoT) boom, with connections rocketing from 8.6 billion this year to 22.3 billion at the end of 2024. But it sees a rather limited role for mobile technology in all this. Of its projected 22.3 billion connections, just 4.1 billion will have anything to do with "cellular" systems. (See Eurobites: Europe Will Remain a 5G Laggard, Says Ericsson Report.)

Let's not forget that the end of 2024 is a whole six years away. That's long enough in any context. If he's still in the job, US President Trump will have to leave the White House around then -- unless he can imitate tyrants in other parts of the world and somehow force through a constitutional change. Six years ago, your correspondent was still a young man in his thirties. Six years from now, he'll have notched up half a century. But in the technology world, six years is an eternity. Internet companies rise and fall in that span of time. Entire ecosystems come and go.