Connected Devices: Machine-to-Machine Markets Solidifying

Global Europe UK ABI Reserch: 2004 and 2005 have seen a sharp increase in telecommunications carriers' interest in cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, M2M involves the use of cellular communications to connect remote sensing and monitoring devices to central networks wirelessly. It is often used for industrial process monitoring, usage metering and security applications. Carriers can opt for involvement in M2M communications on three levels: providing only bandwidth and airtime; offering limited services and outsourcing others; or attempting to be a full end-to-end services provider. Many, he says, are still figuring out where best to position themselves on that spectrum. In the UK the four major wireless carriers — O2, T-Mobile, Orange and Vodafone have expanded their M2M offerings. Orange could be seen as adopting a more 'expanded services' model, while Vodafone has chosen a more limited offering. Across the rest of Europe, he adds, carriers and MVNOs are making similar choices, while in North America, there has been increased commitment from Cingular, Sprint and Verizon. The deployments of higher-speed networks such as GPRS, EVDO, and EDGE has helped raise interest. M2M's ARPU is lower than that of voice services, but so are its marketing costs; there is much less churn, network deployments are generally less expensive, and feature longer life cycles. Companies are sending a message to Wall Street: there are two pieces to our enterprise — voice and data — and we must address them separately.

Cellular Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Networks Publ20050622 GPRS?