Report: Cellular M2M Growth Set to Return In 2010

Beecham Research has announced the release of its latest market research survey titled, ‘M2M Cellular Forecast Market Brief,’ which is a global Cellular Machine To Machine market forecast, including mobile to mobile, and its main prediction is that Cellular M2M growth rates will return in 2010 and then steadily keep growing till 2013.

Research analysts at the company say that Cellular M2M markets had taken a tumble in 2008 because the economy is in bad shape and an important indicative stat was the slowdown in mobile handset device volume sales in 2008 as compared with sales in 2007.

As MobilityTechzone has earlier reported, 1.21 billion mobile handsets, including 171 million smartphones, were sold in the year 2008 resulting in a 5.4 percent increase in sales over the previous year, 2007. When compared with a 16 percent increase in sales in 2007 over 2006, this shows a sharp drop in sales.

The company claims that projects being scaled down, postponed or altogether cancelled, and component stocks being run down, more so in the last two quarters of 2008 were the prime reasons for the gluey growth.

The main reason the research report predicts sales to be more than $ 2 billion by 2013 is because of a new phenomenon that has loosely been given the umbrella term, "Internet of Things," is all set to provide the critical impetus that the cellular M2M market segment so desperately yearns for. MobilityTechzone has earlier reported on the explosion of broadband and broadband related technologies and products all over the planet.

Beecham briefly describes the "Internet of Things,” with respect to cellular M2M, as the use of the Internet for collecting, processing and distributing real time data from remote devices, and its research report categorizes technologies as under: General Packet Radio Service, Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution, Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Wideband CDMA, CDMA 2000 1 times Radio Transmission, CDMA2000 EVolution Data Only, and CDMA2000 EVolution Data and Voice.

The Beecham report further classifies the stats of each category with respect to individual geographic regions such as Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, or AsiaPac.

MobilityTechzone has reported earlier that 3G and third generation partnership project (3GPP) technologies will account for more than 30 percent of all subscriptions across the globe by 2013, which is significant when compared with 11 percent in 2008.

Another comparative analysis had predicted that the LTE Mobile Broadband will generate global revenues to the tune of $70 billion by the end of 2014, as MobilityTechzone has reported. The main reason put forward is that download speeds will increase to 100 mega bits per second (mbit/s), helping  businesses and individuals to perform transactions much faster than they are doing today - a prime motivating factor for the technology to be universally adopted, provided service providers can keep prices competitive.

This information recalls a report cited earlier on MobilityTechzone, claiming that mobile or wireless broadband (Wi-B) usage has sky-rocketed by 84 percent from 2007 to 2008 and that by 2013 more than 33 percent of all mobile subscribers will be Wi-B enabled.

Abetting the turn in fortunes for M2M should be the predicted significant shift towards mobile commerce, near field communications payments and Web-enabled payments, as MobilityTechzone had earlier reported.

Additionally helping the cause should be a new technologies such as: Wireless open-Access Research Platform, also referred to as WARP, which allegedly transfers data 100 times faster than 3G Networks (100x3G), reported MobilityTechzone, and is being majorly researched by Toyota in attempting to avoid collisions between vehicles and enhance overall traffic management by testing car-to-car communications; and, Novatel Wireless’ MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot, which is a portable Wi-B device with a small footprint that magically combines the functions of a wireless modem, access point and router, and has built in CDMA and Wi-Fi antennas, reported MobilityTechzone. It accesses, or intercepts, wireless transmission and distributes it within a radius of 30 feet to a maximum of 5 devices that may be as varied as Wi-Fi enabled laptops, mobiles, IP cameras, printers, MP3 players, and gaming consoles.