The carriers will utterly not present a viable solution to IoT. Neither will industry.
There will be 'application specific' things that use current networks to achieve IoT, but as far as the carriers are concerned, it'll be like 'low bandwidth mobile phones' or something along those lines.
I have no faith in carriers ability to innovate, and industry is not good at presenting 'grand magical architectures'.
Something like this could happen: auto companies get together with carriers, and ask for some kind of special device/rate/services. They get special gear made for cars. And then other industries start to use that architecture. Reason being, only Ford/GM etc. are big enough to have real impetus with carriers, and Ford/GM will have specific requirements + the 'long term horizon' enough to guarantee revenue stream. Then other industries hop on board and we have IoT that's used for a lot of stuff, but that was originally designed for cars. Something like that.
The carriers are their own worst enemy. Remember when they charged 10 cents per 'WAP' page with a little bit of text and a few links?