"There is great potential for UK businesses to take leadership of the fast growing market. The benefits to UK cities and citizens of deploying smart solutions will also propel UK companies into burgeoning export markets," said Lord Erroll, who chairs HyperCatCity's Advisory Board.
At the same time, BT has been talking about bringing download rates in excess of 500Mbit/s to 'most of' the country within the next 10 years and said that it was planning to develop a premium fibre broadband service that would offer 1Gbit/s.
Sounds great, until you read that rural businesses, schools and homes in the UK still suffer from poor broadband connections; questions are still being raised about the time it is taking for new services to be rolled out and the plans themselves are criticised as not being ambitious enough.
The UK government wants to provide 95% of the UK with download speeds of 24Mbit/s or higher by 2017, but that compares unfavourably with Finnish plans to have a baseline speed of 100Mbit/s by next year. South Korea, meanwhile, wants its citizens equipped with 1Gbit/s by 2017.
According to the Federation of Small Businesses, 49% of rural small businesses are dissatisfied with the quality of their broadband provision, which is seen as critical to their future success, and the current lack of broadband infrastructure serving small firms threatens the expansion of the rural economy, which is worth around £400bn and includes 28% of all UK firms.
Mike Cherry, National Policy Chairman for the Federation of Small Businesses, said: "This research paints a worrying picture of a divided business broadband landscape in the UK. We risk seeing the emergence of a two-speed online economy resulting from poor rural broadband infrastructure."
The Internet of Things is set to revolutionise the way we live and work, but it's a revolution whose benefits should be within the reach of everyone – and that starts with broadband service.
