The markets include: utility metering; mobile connected buildings; consumer
and commercial telematics; and retail and banking connections. These areas will all show substantial growth in both device numbers and in the service revenues they represent, while healthcare monitoring applications will begin to reach the commercial roll out stage from 2012.
“The most widespread category will be connections related to smart metering, driven partly by government initiatives to reduce carbon emissions,” said Anthony Cox, senior analyst at Juniper Research.
Other areas, such as the healthcare sector, will ultimately see more potential in achieving service revenues, he claimed.
Further findings from the Embedded Mobile and M2M research include: Saturation in operators’ core businesses is leading mobile operators to re-evaluate and invest in the potential of M2M; Operators and M2M specialists recognise that scale is key, since ARPU for M2M and embedded devices is lower than for standard mobile
Services; Regulatory initiatives in different geographical areas will provide an important fillip for the M2M market such as European Directives on smart
metering; With the exception of certain consumer applications such as mobile gaming and eReaders, 3G’s use for M2M applications will be limited for the immediate future as M2M usually does not require the high bandwidth 3G affords.