WHEN the talkers and texters upgrade to the next generation of faster 3G cellphone networks sometime in the next decade, what will happen to today鈥檚 common or garden mobile phone systems? Perhaps they will fall out of use and into disrepair, like canals did when the railways stole their traffic. Or maybe they will be switched off and forgotten about, like the old pneumatic tube system that Victorian London relied on to send messages and power lifts.
But there is a third possibility, say telecoms analysts: the old phone networks will be reborn with an important new function. They predict that the old networks will hum with the traffic of text messages from a new breed of communicator 鈥� machines.
Machine-to-machine (M2M) technology is already gathering pace in the form of short-range systems such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and radio-frequency identification tags. But the phone networks that could host long-range M2M are already in place.
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The promise is that virtually any device you can think of 鈥� front-door locks, burglar alarms, electricity and water meters, greenhouses, cash machines and cars 鈥� will have a built-in cellphone little bigger than an after-dinner mint that it will use to send data. So you can determine their status 鈥� locked, unlocked, stolen, freezing, and so on 鈥� and control them remotely, all for the cost of a text message.
This is the kind of win-win situation that excites business analysts. Mobile phone makers will gain a new market, the phone networks will profit from the extra traffic, and the customers will relish the unprecedented power to remotely monitor and control their world over a wireless network without having to worry about maintenance or technical support. The savings for businesses could be huge.
Of course, the tricky part is to come. The communication infrastructure is just one part of what is needed to make M2M work. It is one thing to build tiny M2M cellphones 鈥� a number of phone makers have already done so 鈥� but quite another to create the robust, reliable hardware and software to link them with machines in a useful way.
Nevertheless, a number of pioneers are already showing that M2M can work. For example, the car-sharing company Zipcar, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a system that records how long a person spends driving one of its vehicles, as well as how far they go, and sends the data back to the company over a cellphone network. The driver is then billed automatically for the use of the car. Zipcar started out in 2000 with a handful of vehicles based in Boston, and now runs a fleet of 180 cars in various cities in the US.
鈥淲e think the automotive area will definitely be the biggest for M2M,鈥� says Sarah Randall, an analyst with the market research company Gartner Dataquest in the UK. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of interest in tracking vehicles and in remote diagnosis of engine problems.鈥�
But it won鈥檛 be cheap to develop systems that make good use of this data. So in a bid to kick-start the market, cellphone makers including Sony Ericsson, Siemens and Nokia have sought out partners to help target specific problems. Nokia, for instance, is working with Box Telematics, an engineering firm based in West Midlands, UK, to create the first off-the-shelf M2M system. Called M2MBoxLite, the device is about twice the size of a deck of cards and houses a memory and a micro-cellphone that relays data across an ordinary network in the form of text messages. It will cost around 拢500. Fitted in a truck, say, the device could relay the vehicle鈥檚 GPS location data to help route planning, or relay temperature data from a refrigerated trailer to make sure food cargoes don鈥檛 spoil. It could even act as an alarm in an emergency.
Just how quickly this market will grow, nobody is sure. But the price of micro-cellphones is plummeting, down from just over 拢100 a year ago to between 拢35 and 拢70 now. Nokia cites research predicting there will be some 100 million M2M connections around the world by 2006. Gartner Dataquest is more conservative 鈥� its projections suggest a total of 26 million devices will be shipped in the US and Europe by 2006. Either way, M2M is coming to a machine near you soon.
What goes up鈥�
Ten years ago, Europe must have seemed like the promised land for the mobile phone pioneers 鈥� a continent teeming with almost 400 million potential cellphone users. And indeed, the boom has created huge wealth for some: in 2002, the Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia made a profit of 鈧�3.4 billion.
Today, though, the future looks less rosy. Almost 80 per cent of people in some European countries now own a mobile phone, so clearly the prospects for growth are severely limited. Could the same rise and fall afflict the machine-to-machine (M2M) market?
Apparently not, says the market research company Forrester Research, which calculates that the number of linkable devices will run into the billions. In Europe there are 200 million cars, 10 billion computer chips, and supply chains containing some 500 billion items that need to be monitored. With this market, says Forrester Research, the sky is the limit.
Perhaps. But not all these devices will be potential cellphone users. Other wireless technologies will be more appropriate, and some may never be linked. But if even a fraction end up getting connected, the industry may be looking at another promised land.
