Tomorrow the world

There are now more than one hundred countries where mobile penetration has passed 100 per cent. Eastern Europe as a whole sat at 126.6 per cent at the end of 2010, with Western Europe trailing slightly at 118 per cent.

The Americas, North and South, are approaching saturation and even Asia Pacific closed out last year with penetration of 68.6 per cent. The message is clear; with the exception of Africa, the untapped human market for mobile subscriptions is relatively small and shrinking fast.

Against this backdrop, the market for machine-to-machine communications, or M2M, is being addressed with renewed vigour reflected, as these things tend to be, in the parlance of the industry. The internet of things is now an established catchphrase, for example, and Ericsson has thrown so much marketing muscle behind the notion that we will soon live in a world of 50 billion connected devices, that the figure has become conversationally inescapable when M2M is under discussion.

To read the full article on the future of M2M communications, written by Mike Hibberd, go to: [http://www.telecoms.com/26250/tomorrow-the-world - article no longer available]