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By
Ed Finegold
A titanium foot treads upon a skull. Red eyes survey a post-apocalyptic landscape. Armed aircraft hover, scanning their search lights across a post-industrial wasteland. These are the images that come to mind when the term “machine-to-machine” is uttered in my presence, mostly because I’ve watched The Terminator too many times. But despite science fiction’s many warnings about the dangers of autonomous technology, from Hal to Agent Smith, the communications industry is all-in for machine-to-machine services. Murderous devices bent on human annihilation seem distant, so we are free to focus on more near term dangers, and lucrative vertical-market opportunities, as machine-to-machine services take off.
M2M Emerges
Instances of machine to machine
communications have been in place for
years. Shipping, manufacturing and
retail players, for example, have used
purpose-built, machine-to-machine
solutions for years to enable package
tracking, just-in-time logistics, and
other supply chain applications. But
those M2M instances “were expensive
and not suitable to widespread
deployment;”
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"Murderous devices bent on human annihilation seem distant, so we are free to focus on more near term dangers, and lucrative vertical-market opportunities." |
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The good news for service providers is
that most industrial M2M applications
don’t consume massive bandwidth and
legacy networks can support them.
“Most of the mass applications are low
bandwidth and yet very powerful,”
says Bill Stanley, strategic business
developer in Telcordia’s OS business
unit.
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for example, have used
purpose-built, machine-to-machine
solutions for years to enable package
tracking, just-in-time logistics, and
other supply chain applications. But
those M2M instances “were expensive
and not suitable to widespread
deployment;” says Ed Pinnes,
executive director of consulting
solutions for Telcordia. Pinnes cites
applications like smart grid, widespread
automotive telematics, and medical monitoring as emerging areas where
M2M is taking off because “costs have
come down, bandwidth has gone up,
and now there are lots of things that
can be done on a M2M basis where the
economics makes sense.”
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The majority of M2M devices and
applications can be supported well on
2 or 2.5G types of networks.
“If I’m the
operator,” says Stanley, “…I’ll make
sure it [the application] sits on that low-end legacy network, and isn’t eating up
bandwidth on the high end network,
and have it generate cash on that
older asset.” He adds that most of
these low-bandwidth applications are
still purpose-built today, however, and
may have trouble scaling. “That will
have to scale,” Stanley says, “and
you’ll need some open environments,”
as are so common in the consumer app
space.
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