By 2020, 12 billion gadgets will be connected to the wireless Internet, and it's time for mobile-phone carriers to prepare for the explosion, executives said.

SAN DIEGOBy 2020, 12 billion gadgets will be connected to the wireless Internet, and it's time for mobile-phone carriers to prepare for the explosion, carrier and device representatives said at a panel on Monday, before the CTIA Wireless trade show began.

Relatively few of those devices will be phones and tablets, according to research shown off by Machina Research, a firm devoted to tracking connected devices. Rather, they'll be power meters, health-care devices, and even refrigerators.

"If all of the refrigerators in San Diego defrosted at the same time when the power grid is at peak utilization, we'd need two more power plants," said Qualcomm executive vice president Bill Davidson. "Something as simple as controlling when that happens could balance the grid better."

New devices will require new kinds of service plans, said Glenn Lurie, AT&T's vice president for emerging devices. But rather than the idea of one data bucket for many devices, Lurie seemed to be promoting something more like the Amazon Kindle model, where a data plan is included with a device and it's invisible to the user.

"We've got to make this so that it's more simple for our customers to understand," Lurie said. "In a sense we also have to make and look at different business models that hide [the data plan]. With the Amazon Kindle model, people don't even know how that thing is connected ... it just works," he said.

Lurie also called out the iPad as a success for new thinking about data plans.

There are major challenges, though. Lurie repeated several times that the industry has been trying to get the price of embedded modules to come down. The huge range in wireless spectrum used by different countries and carriers is also posing problems for interoperability.

"Right now we support more than 41 bands in our chipsets to address this issue," Davidson said - but nobody on the panel wanted to take on the concern that U.S. carriers were designing devices to exclude other carriers' bands.

"There are more than 40 LTE bands. It's a real problem," Lurie said.

But with 13 million customers already in AT&T's Emerging Devices group, Lurie and the other panelists emphasized that these module-based devices, often referred to as machine-to-machine, were going to provide a lot of the growth in mobile technology in the next decade.

"This is where the business is going - the space is about multiple verticals, multiple opportunities, new business models and finding a way to grow," Lurie said.