This proceedings constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First EAI International Conference on Forthcoming Networks and Sustainability in the IoT Era, FoNeS 2020, held in October 2020. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The 13 papers presented were carefully selected from 28 submissions. The papers focus application areas for advanced communication systems and development of new services, in an attempt to facilitate the tremendous growth of new devices and smart things that need to be connected to the Internet through a variety of wireless technologies. The papers are organized in topical sections on IoT and network applications; machine learning and distributed computing; and