M2M to multiply?

Wireless communications are becoming increasingly pervasive. Mobile phones – the most obvious form – are now widely used and wireless access through WiFi is gaining ground rapidly. It’s not only the consumer market where wires are becoming a communications method of the past. The industrial arena is seeing growing interest in wireless communications. The reasons are varied, but include cost; for example, it’s cheaper to have wireless communications that to have to rewire a factory when the layout changes or new equipment is installed. This market sector has become known as M2M – machine to machine communications. But it’s not only machine to machine nowadays; it could be machine to mobile or vice versa. One of the first applications envisaged for M2M was for vending machines. Giving them the ability to communicate would allow them to send a report when they needed refilling or when a fault was detected. John Jones, technical director of M2M specialist Spectre, noted: “It was a simplistic model, but the economics didn’t work. What is making M2M interesting today is the different wireless standards that are coming together. There’s Bluetooth in a lot of consumer devices today and if you take that and think about gsm and gps, you can start thinking about M2M in delivery vehicles, for example.”