Pipeline Publishing | OSS and BSS News and Info

Pipeline Publishing, Volume 7, Issue 10

	This Month's Issue:
	Unlocking Next Gen Networks

Debating Opportunities in Machine-to-Machine

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M2M’s emergence, in the shadow of the consumer app explosions, leads to some confusion. “M2M tied up with 4G is hype being tied up with hype,” says Pinnes. He points out that entertainment is driving most of the growth in bandwidth consumption on 4G networks but says “M2M is not in the same league.” Operators might remember, however, that a service “doesn’t have to use a lot of bandwidth to be highly monetizable;” Pinnes says, “like SMS, which generates a lot of revenue without using much bandwidth.”

Definitive Debate

15 years in OSS/BSS has proven to me that engineers love semantic debates. They are typically important and valuable in defining standards that make technology work. Imagine if there weren’t agreement on the basic layers that make up a network; I’ll guess there’d be no Internet.

Certainly there are times when semantic debates fail to acknowledge the bigger picture. There’s a debate brewing in machine-to-machine circles that may just miss the point, and service providers are probably best served to steer clear of it.

“M2M tied up with 4G is hype being tied up with hype.” –Ed Pinnes, executive director of consulting solutions, Telcordia.

Stanley says that in some circles, by definition “M2M is generally a many to one situation” where “the device has an affinity to one host” and does not connect to multiple places or make intelligent decisions about where it will connect. An example of this would be automated meter reading systems in increasing use in the electric utility vertical. The meters, in this case, aren’t making intelligent decisions about where to send data; they just monitor and transmit to a fixed point. This type of application can exist in any number of vertical industries where devices are collecting and transmitting data on anything from logistics and telemetry to security and health or network monitoring.

But limiting M2M’s definition to purpose-built networks of devices that don’t make intelligent decisions, or don’t have the ability to make autonomous decisions about where to send certain types of data, would seem to overlook both reality and opportunity. What we’re seeing develop in consumer apps provides a glimpse into what’s possible. In a sense, the apps on one’s smartphone or tablet could themselves be considered devices or machines; they may be software-based, but they’re still machines.

We already see examples of apps that can operate autonomously to back up data, photos and videos from a smartphone to the cloud. Once the human user configures the settings, the device can act on its own. It’s not a stretch to think that a user could tell the device to post videos to YouTube, photos to Facebook, and emailed documents to DropBox.

The human may not push another button or do anything other than shoot photos and video during a week-long family trip to Orlando; but every night her smartphone uploads her files on its own.

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