Reader Forum: M2M network resilience; are users under-estimating its importance?

The machine-to-machine sector is fast becoming a victim of its own success. As the world wakes up to the infinite possibilities of empowering machines to communicate, the fight for bandwidth and reliability has highlighted the fragility of the public network, particularly when it comes to “no fail” applications.
In the last year we’ve seen a number of critical M2M failures where traffic over the public network has halted – either through over-capacity or technical issues. For applications where resilience is a “nice to have” but not essential, users can live with such downtime. But for those requiring total confidence and security, staying within the public network is not an option. The critical failures witnessed left enterprises paralyzed – assets not traceable, CCTV monitoring equipment with no pictures, and a feeling of complete helplessness as the mobile network operators looked to restore the outage.
The M2M connectivity eco-system is following that of office telephony and networking. From public network, to ISDN and ADSL, to leased line – the commercial world soon realized that ownership of their networks was the only way to ensure security and resilience. Today, organizations of all sizes are now considering the range of options to keep their SIM-enabled connected devices online, all of the time, with end-to end security. And it’s becoming apparent that for many developers and systems integrators, private network connectivity for important no-fail applications is becoming the de facto standard.
Developing a private network is possible but with this comes big capital costs and the need to continually review infrastructure and investment as networks are added to the platform. Complete security, failover and back-up – yes to all of this. However, it is increasingly noticeable that organizations that have already chosen this route or are about to consider their network requirement, are thinking again – for many, managing a private network is not generally core competency to their mainstream business activity.
Overlaying a secure private communication platform that transcends all of the mobile networks is another, more cost-effective option. Here, organizations get all of the advantages of having their own leased line, private access point and data centers, but without the capital cost. In the last three years, such platforms have come into their own as users of all sizes recognize the need to ensure connectivity without outage.
So users need to explore the risks associated with public network access. Whilst the economic and environmental benefits of M2M connectivity are clear for all to see, it is the reliability factor that must be front of mind as the world continues to make connections with even more devices. My advice is to put the outage risk assessment high on the agenda as you seek to plan new deployments. Talk to your provider to measure up cost versus benefit. Investigate SLAs, that’s if they are available at all. And remember that with most M2M applications the success is often measured in their lifetime longevity – reliance on a public network may be good for today, but think again about the usage surge in the months and years ahead.