It's rare that a week goes by in which there isn't a lot of activity in the M2M space — and this week is no exception. Here's a look at a few of the top stories from the week.
New research from Informa Telecoms and Media presented a startling revelation: China has surpassed the U.S. as the largest cellular M2M market. This has apparently been the case since the second half of 2012, when China Mobile, the largest cellular provider in the country, reported an increase of 5.5 million cellular connections. This is just a part of the global M2M market's growth, however, which is expected to reach 315 million connections by the end of 2015.
Of course, during this period of growth, companies and telcos have to decide on what speed is best for M2M use. Indeed, as IoTevolutionworld Missa Sangimino reports, while many are turning to 4G in order to achieve the fastest transfer rates, others don't think the expense is worth the added speed. This seems to be particularly true for M2M, where 2G speeds are often enough to get the job done.
Regardless of the network, though, Manish Gupta, vice president of marketing for Symmetricom, claims that — for smart grid technology, at least — power and timing are critical factors. This need is, according to a recent white paper from Symmetricom called “Profile for the Use of the Precision Time Protocol in Power Substations,” largely due to Synchrophasors (phasor measurement units) and the SCADA system.
In other news, SMARTCom Solutions this week debuted its new SMARTCom 1150 3G wireless gateway, which enables faster transmission of wireless-to-wireless data, while boosting reliability. This low-cost appliance can be retrofitted into any M2M or energy monitoring station, where it reads and routs electric meter data or data from a connected Ethernet or 802.15.4 wireless devices, transmitting it through a 3G cellular network to any server or cloud application.
Lastly, FreeWave Technologies received M2M Evolution's 2012 product of the year award for its GXM global transceiver module. This compact radio is capable of operating in tight spaces, as well as international environments — basically anywhere 900Mhz frequencies are available. This makes it ideal for applications like precision agriculture, water utilities operations, smart grids and petroleum.
That's all for this week, but there's plenty more M2M news on the M2M Evolution page.
