Several mobile giants from Asia to the US have announced plans to form a technological alliance to jointly develop M2M services for multinational corporations.
KPN, NTT Docomo, Rogers, SingTel, Telefonica, Telstra and Vimpelcom claim their cooperation…
Several mobile giants from Asia to the US have announced plans to form a technological alliance to jointly develop M2M services for multinational corporations.
KPN, NTT Docomo, Rogers, SingTel, Telefonica, Telstra and Vimpelcom claim their cooperation agreement will address the fragmented nature of the current M2M market. They aim to provide a seamless M2M solution and reduce costs through shared development.
“The goal is to stimulate the sale of M2M communications across a number of distinct high-potential industries such as consumer electronics, automotive, energy efficiency, etc. enabling the development of new business models, the creation of new products and services and a reduction in operational costs for these target industries,” explained a joint statement.
The statement added that the alliance was open to other operators.
Notably, each of the current alliance members are also customers of Jasper Wireless’s M2M connectivity platform.
Frost & Sullivan analyst Yiru Zhong highlighted how the alliance would benefit Jasper Wireless directly by paving the way to potentially add more customers onto its connectivity platform. However, she struggled to identify significant advantages for the seven telco partners themselves.
She added: “A significant advantage of this partnership, however, is addressing roaming challenges, especially in M2M industries such as automotive and logistics applications … The partners will also benefit for scale arguments when negotiating M2M devices, modules, API standardisation and M2M platform roadmap development.”
Zhong said the alliance would also put pressure on other M2M connectivity platforms, adding that Swedish vendor Ericsson’s progress with telcos since it acquired Telenor Connexxion’s connectivity platform has been “relatively slow”.
Analysys Mason described the agreement as “another indication of the rapid, multi-national growth of M2M”. The research firm estimates that M2M device connections will grow from an expected 124.4 million at the end of 2012 to 2.1 billion connections by 2021
Other notable M2M partnerships to date include a strategic agreement between Vodafone and Verizon, and a service alliance between Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Everything Everywhere, TeliaSonera and Sprint.
