RACO Wireless made a pair of announcements on Tuesday at the Connected World conference that add breadth and maintain a level of depth in the Machine-to-Machine ecosystem.
The first announcement stated that RACO Wireless and T-Mobile USA will partner with Apriva to support the mobile payment firm’s Point of Sale customers that use 2G payment terminals. The second announcement pointed to a partnership with Enterprise Mobile to offer M2M application providers outsourced product deployment, management and fulfillment services.
Key Points
- Taken together, RACO’ Wireless’ announcements demonstrate the company’s commitment to positioning itself at the center of a robust, carrier-grade M2M ecosystem.
- The Enterprise Mobile partnership extends the professional services model that network operators are becoming increasingly comfortable with to a community of app developers that should benefit from the ability to outsource important, yet non-core competencies to partners with ties into the broader ecosystem of M2M partners and customers.
- The Apriva partnership not only demonstrates RACO/TMO’s willingness to work with customers in support of legacy technology, but also helps the two companies tap into a revenue stream that some carriers could be willing to forego in order to retire/re-farm 2G spectrum in support of LTE roll-outs.
- M2M revenue potential aside, it remains unclear the extent to which T-Mobile’s move is defensive given the spectrum challenges it is dealing with in the face of LTE roll-outs from competitors.
Breadth: Outsourcing Services for M2M App Developers
Working with telecom network operators is a notorious laborious process. Oftentimes the process of simply qualifying to do business with an operator can be sufficiently burdensome to severely hamper the ability of smaller development shops to remain viable. The partnership between RACO Wireless and Enterprise Mobile seeks to help alleviate that problem in the M2M application development space by providing logistical support that helps to not only streamline the process of working with network operators, but also fill in knowledge and/or operation skills gaps that might exist in a small development shop.
Depth: 2G’s Long Tail
Though 2G might not exactly be wireless’ version of SONET/SDH – a technology whose demise has been 10 years out for the past 10 years – it is probably safe to say that it has jumped the shark… except where M2M is concerned. Because of the relative little bandwidth needed for, say, Coke machines, to talk to each other, there are plenty of M2M applications where 2G technology will be more than adequate to satisfy the connection requirements. The problem is that with many operators eager to re-farm 2G spectrum in support of LTE deployments, 2G M2M terminals could be rendered obsolete. RACO’s announcement should assuage any such fears for at least the “foreseeable future”.
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