Telefonica sets up international M2M unit

Telefonica has set up an international Machine to Machine (M2M) business unit that will support its enterprise customer base in all the markets where it operates. The newly created M2M Unit consists of more than 100 Telefonica staff incorporating sales, marketing, technical and innovation resources.
In a statement, the operator was keen to stress that the unit will be backed by its successful ‘Global M2M’ service, which it claims is the “first integrated solution in the market which provides a turnkey solution and is supported by any communication technology, not being limited to mobile [eg SMS, GPRS and UMTS].” For example, it says Global M2M can be supported by ADSL or technology such as Zigbee, UWB, satellite, RFID and NFC.
Interest in the M2M sector is growing as operators look for ways to offset declining voice revenues. M2M is a general concept referring to the exchange of information in data format between two remote machines through either the mobile or fixed network. It doesn’t require human intervention and it has a set of specific features regarding traffic and SIM cards. This week analyst firm Berg Insight claimed that 1.4 percent of the mobile network connections worldwide were used for wireless M2M communication at the end of 2009, and that this figure will rise to 3.1 percent by 2014 (when the total number of wireless M2M connections will be 187.1 million). A number of major operators have backed the technology, including Vodafone, Telenor,T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint. 

source: GSMA MBB