Overview of the Brazil's National IoT Plan

The Brazilian government sees great potential in IoT technologies to leverage growth in the Brazilian economy, and therefore announced a set of strategies to incentivise its expansion.

In this article you will learn what the most important points of the action plan are for the development of IoT in Brazil.

Brazil has created several programmes to promote the expansion and to strengthen different industries over the past decades, including IT and telecommunications. One of the most notorious and successful initiatives was the National Broadband Plan, created in 2010. The plan managed to bring 1Mbps broadband access to all municipalities in Brazil at low prices and paved the way for many other telecommunications services and technologies that depended on this very basic infrastructure to reach the masses.

Brazil ’s National IoT Programme Background

In a move similar to the National Broadband Plan, The Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication, known as MCTIC and BNDES, the Brazilian Development Bank announced a set of initiatives to guide the development and acceleration ofthe adoption of Internet of Things in Brazil.

The document was developed with the input from organisations, both governmental, non-governmental and private, all considered to be key to push this industry forward, aside from public consultations, which received nearly 2300 contributions.

The action plan, announced in October 2017, provided some directives to encourage the development of the entire IoT ecosystem and regulatory environment, by outlining a range of initiatives that should be accomplished on short (1 year), medium and long term (up to 5 years) perspectives. Aside from setting different time perspectives, initiatives were broken down into three different levels, depending upon their urgency to be addressed or the impact generated in the sector.

To simplify the understanding, the action plan was designed as a matrix where there are four verticals, represented by the main sectors like health and smart cities, whereas the horizontals will provide the necessary requirements and base for the development of the verticals.

The IoT Action Plan for Horizontal Priorities

The horizontals will touch upon important topics that need to be addressed in order to create a solid foundation for the development of the overall IoT ecosystem and infrastructure in Brazil. These will benefit not only the priority sectors outlined in the study, but the development of IoT in Brazil as a whole.

The horizontals are multidisciplinary, covering the following topics:

• Innovation and internationalisation: This set of initiatives aims to support innovation and cooperation through funding and promotion of success cases, both nationally and internationally
• Human capital: Increasing the specialised workforce in the priority segments, promoting training for government employees on IoT and strengthening local R&D
• Regulatory safety and privacy: As this is a quite extensive horizontal, with themes beyond IoT, the plan has simplified the approach to the subject by limiting it mainly to address telecommunication regulations that may affect IoT, providing framework for a personal data protection regulation, privacy and security
• Infrastructure for connectivity and interoperability: The efforts here are focused on increasing the access to communication networks to fulfill the IoT demands, insert the IoT themes in public policies related to telecoms, and incentivise the standardisation and interoperability of the devices and IoT systems

Focus Opportunities for the Brazilian IoT Plan

The plan was conceived to provide a basis for the development of all IoT sectors, however a few priority areas were chosen to be accelerated by the programme. These areas were selected due to the capability of development combined with demand. These areas are:

• Smart cities: The smart cities IoT projects prioritised will be within mobility, public safety, and utilities
• Health: Focused on chronical diseases, prevention of epidemics, increase in efficiency and cost reduction in hospitals
• Rural: Solutions with focus on efficient usage of natural resources, inputs and machinery, and sanitary safety
• IIoT: Within IIoT, the study considers both heavy industry and manufacturing. Projects or solutions with focus on improving processes, promoting the development of new equipment products and new business models that incorporate IoT and solutions that integrate supplier chains of goods, components, services and inputs

Across all these verticals, innovation appears as a strategic goal, valuing national and locally developed solutions.

Other opportunities that were also considered by the study were logistics, retail, connected cars, office automation and smart homes. Apart from smarthomes, all these opportunities were scoring high in terms of demand, but were deemed below the development capacity by this study, and therefore were not chosen as focus opportunities.

Next Steps

BNDES and MCTIC will publish separate reports for each of the verticals chosen as focus opportunities, outlining them in detail in December 2017. A final version of the study is also scheduled to be published in December 2017.

It is expected that the organisations that took part in the study, will be the ones that will follow the action plan through. One of the most important contributors to the study, the Câmara IoT, created in 2014 by MCTIC to manage topics related to IoT, is an organisation composed of 50 institutions including different ministries, governmental agencies, universities and associations and will be one of the key players for the success of the action plan due to its influence in regulatory topics.