The M2M opportunity for service providers was a key theme this year at MWC 2014. Carriers discussed the business models that their customers are exploring, and vendors shared innovations that are set to expand carrier offerings in the months ahead. Demand is driven by corporate customers eager to leverage mobile networks in new ways.
“Big multi-nationals are saying ‘this could transform my industry if I play my cards right,'” said Michael Troiano, AT&T’s vice president of advanced mobility solutions. Troiano said that a classic M2M application is using chips and mobile networks to track items during transport, and monitor variables like temperature and location. But that’s just the beginning.
“It’s very much beyond transport. That gets you into the conversation, [but] what customers want from us right now are discussions around platforms, applications,” said Troiano. “In some cases we’re delivering the applications in what I’ll call a pre-packaged form to the enterprise. In other cases, enterprise customers are saying ‘There’s nothing that exists off the shelf. Help build us custom application, put it on your platform, host it for us, look at the business analytics, the data, and make sense of it.'”
Troiano said that many of AT&T’s customers first approached M2M as a replacement for wireline connectivity. Now he says more and more companies around the world are looking at supplementing 3G or even 4G connectivity with Ethernet, Wi-Fi, satellite service or wireline in order to create a global M2M network. “Our biggest experience right now truly is on the global stage,” he said. “How do we work with companies to put that global SIM into that device and whether that machine operates in South Dakota, South America or South Africa, how do i start to take, for example, diagnostics off those engines so I can bring that back to the manufacturer so they can in essence build better machines.”
Meanwhile vendors that supply the carriers see a new opportunity at the intersection of NFV and M2M. “One of the attributes of M2M is not a lot of data but a lot of signal. If you think of it, signal is really a software function,” said Alcatel-Lucent CTO Marcus Weldon. “So in fact a lot of the M2M control functions, control plane you’ll see virtualized early on, and the interesting part of that is it allows you to then offer that M2M control function to different enterprises. You can think of asset tracking, fleet tracking, medical sensor tracking. So once I can virtualize it, I can create packages of software that I bring up and offer to different enterprises for different types of services. So operators have an opportunity to actually develop new revenue.”
Watch the RCR Wireless interview with AT&T’s Michael Troiano.
Watch the RCR Wireless interview with Alcatel-Lucent’s Marcus Weldon.
