The CTIA's Enterprise & Applications show is taking place this week in San Diego, and the champion buzzword is "M2M," aka machine-to-machine communications. The cellular operators (whom CTIA represents) see M2M as one of their best hopes for climbing the food chain and being something other than wireless bit-haulers when high-bandwidth, IP-based 4G emerges--at the same time that mobile OS-based app stores offer significant over-the-top plays that could cut the carriers out of the value loop in some areas.
I had a chance to sit down at the show with Tom Nelson, group manager-emerging solutions with Sprint, which announced a partnership with Ideal Life, a maker of remote health monitoring products. The partnership will bring to market monitoring devices like fingertip clips that measure pulse and oxygen rates, and which connect via Bluetooth to a black-box device about the size and shape of a hockey puck. This device has a wireless antenna that communicates via 3G wireless to the management system associated with whatever health provider is delivering the remote-monitoring service. The device finds its home system and automatically registers with it the first time it's set up.
Its round shape notwithstanding, the interface device looks like it could be a Linksys broadband router, which raised the obvious question of why this service would use a wireless 3G wide area connection to send the health monitoring data, instead of just a DSL or cable broadband connection. The answer, according to Tom Nelson, is that the usage scenario requires installation to be literally plug-and-play in its simplicity. You just turn the thing on, it finds its management system over the cellular network, and you're good to go.
That's critical when elderly patients are expected to be one likely major end user group for such a service. But another market that this service will be pitched at is enterprises or groups setting up kiosks, maybe at a health fair or some other venue that requires really fast, almost foolproof setup and configuration.
The ultimate objective, of course, is to lower the costs of health care and preventative care in particular. Obviously, monitoring elderly patients from home is likely to reduce costs, and presumably an employer may be interested in working with employees to improve their health, especially if such efforts can lower the employer's health insurance premiums.
This Sprint-Ideal Life partnershp is a good demonstration of where M2M fits in the larger puzzle of enterprise mobility. The little "hockey puck" is a relatively dumb device, and in theory there's no reason you couldn't write a medical telemetry application to run on an iPhone, in which the iPhone would collect the data from the finger clip via Bluetooth, and transmit it to the central management system. But we're talking about a single-purpose, special purpose application here, and if we don't want Grandma to have to make sure she's got working broadband from Comcast, we certainly don't want her to have to go find the right app in the App Store, download it, agree to the Terms & Conditions, etc. etc. A black box is what you want there.
Another way the carriers can use M2M to their advantage is by optimizing how their networks are used. A medical telemetry app like the one Sprint announced with Ideal Life may not need 4G bandwidth, because the data stream is relatively light; in fact, some M2M applications may even run on 2G where that infrastructure is still in place, which obviously lets the carrier squeeze more out of that existing investment, Tom Nelson said.
Separately from the medical-monitoring announcement, Sprint also put out a release here at the CTIA event, summarizing the four areas that it's prioritizing in its attack on the M2M market:
* Connected Transportation--Fleet management for anything related to cars, trucks, planes, trains.
* Connected Meters, Sensors & Alarms--Smart grid, simple alarms for things like gates left open, etc.
* Connected Machines, Screens & Things--Digital signage and kiosks
* Connected Personal Devices--The Amazon Kindle is the classic example here--a personal device with a hard-wired connection to the Sprint network to do its work with cloud-based services.
It's tempting to see the cellular carriers as playing catch-up to the over-the-top smartphone application industry, but the operators have got a lot going for them in the M2M world, not the least of which is that these are mission-critical, potentially even life-or-death applications. So the enterprises that want to use these M2M apps, or provide services to their own customers based on these apps, will probably insist on a solid partnership with the operator that will be carrying this vital data.
