Rating and charging mechanisms are flexible as well. “A company may or may not know what their
usage looks like,” said Ferguson. “Do their devices ping the network once a month? Do they ping it
every second? We allow customers to see their usage so that they can adjust their rate plan up or down
and avoid overages and avoid paying for more data than they really need. “
Customers can also set up alarms and triggers to guard against unusual activity. If a device that usually
only pings the network very rarely starts using massive amounts of data, and there may be some sort of
fault or fraud, the customer is alerted and can investigate,” said Ferguson.
There are other baked-in OSS/BSS goodies, too. “We have network monitoring where we can shoulder-
tap the device to make sure it’s on,” Ferguson continued. “We can work with third-party network
companies that can run diagnostics on a model. Let’s not roll a truck if we don’t need to. Let’s do as
much of this remotely as we can. We’re trying to make it convenient and easy for the customer.”
While Sprint has not announced which OSS/BSS vendors it is working with to make these systems all go,
Ferguson told me that Sprint hopes to have some of those announcements out later this year.
“We also offer some integration in the command center with those partners, so not only would you get
the functionality that we’ve built into the command center, but some of those third parties that provide
that next layer of diagnostics can share APIs,” said Ferguson.
“What we find is that the creative ideas from the application providers and support providers are
really coming from the ecosystem of M2M. When you think about it, the data demand of supporting a
thousand digital signs is completely different than if you are tracking e-readers or connected vehicles,”
said Tom Nelson.
And so, as we begin the march toward billions or trillions of connected devices, we see service providers
seeking to provide service for the machines as they become more a part of our connected lives.
Now, if you’ll pardon me, I just got a call from my refrigerator. It wanted to let me know that it’s
running.
