Wireless M2M: Seizing the Pervasive Internet Opportunity

Not so long ago, we heard that “the Internet changes everything.” While some major changes did occur in the “first wave,” in fact not everything was altered. For many, little or nothing changed except that workers and executives now use e-mail. The result may be complacency, a sigh of relief, and a look forward to several decades more of business as usual. Yet, hardly any error could be more costly than to underestimate the magnitude, or mistake the nature, of the change that will come as devices, having already outnumbered people as Internet users, continue to connect at an increasing rate.

Wireless is now at the forefront of this change. Already over 50% of new device connectivity is wireless – in many European countries over 80% – and this share is set to increase a great deal further as the variety of wireless technologies increases and costs continue to rapidly decline. The cost of a wireless connection now routinely undercuts that of a fixed one, opening up new application opportunities all the time for both mobile and static applications.

The Promise of the Pervasive Internet
For decades, we have been steadily building electronic intelligence into manufactured objects by means of sensors, controllers, and microprocessors. Today, virtually all products that use electricity—from toys and coffee makers to cars and medical diagnostics—possess inherent data-processing capability. It thus follows that virtually all electronic and electro-mechanical products now contain a wealth of information about their status, usage, and performance. If a machine, or a consumer product, or a building is not presently monitoring every detail that its creator might wish to extract, it can easily and cheaply be made to do so.

Until recently, this information has gone largely unharvested and unleveraged, even though it can offer extraordinary business advantage to the companies that manufacture and provide services involving those products, especially in terms of customer relationships. Most electronic and electro-mechanical products are still viewed as standalone objects, not things that could or should be connected. But with the advent of the Internet coupled with the rapidly reducing costs of wireless connections, along with recent developments in large-scale storage and data mining, the major obstacles to intelligent device networking have vanished almost overnight.

The networking of such devices has enormous potential for new services, based on the convergence of networks, embedded computing, control and content; often referred to as “device networking” or “machine-to-machine” (M2M) messaging. Harbor Research calls this phenomenon the “Pervasive Internet” – the fusion of pervasive computing, Internet connectivity and new enterprise-level data-management applications, and Web-based smart services that together can provide a new level of capability in the enterprise.

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