"It's not just about phones anymore," declared a recent Sprint press release about accelerating healthcare devices and other M2M devices to market. Sprint isn't the only carrier to see beyond the phone in recent weeks: Verizon Wireless and AT&T have both made similar moves.
A few weeks after Verizon Wireless announced a machine-to-machine (M2M) joint venture with Qualcomm, AT&T opened a device certification lab that will accelerate the entry of "netbooks, eReaders, portable navigation devices, utility products, and healthcare-related tracking devices" into the market.
Yesterday, Sprint announced a multi-year agreement with M2M company DataSmart to help embedded device makers to bring their products to market sooner. As part of the announcement the carrier quoted Yankee Group's Vice President of Research Steve Hilton: "The demand for sophisticated M2M applications that provide data transmission is growing. Specifically, the rapid growth in M2M healthcare, energy and fleet services is fueling the need for faster and easier deployment models."
A recent report from Harbor Research predicted that M2M device shipments might top 430 million units by 2013, thanks to demand from wireless personal area networks and wireless sensor networks technologies. You can bet wireless healthcare will be one of the key use cases driving that trend.
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg seems to think so: During a keynote at CTIA Wireless this past spring, Seidenberg noted that while the U.S. is fast approaching a penetration rate north of 90 percent of the population using mobile phones, the opportunity to reach 500 percent penetration is possible thanks to embedded devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) services. Seidenberg specifically pointed to connected medical devices like a wireless-enabled glucose monitor as an example of an embedded device that could push the industry to 500 percent penetration. That means a lot more than 430 million M2M devices shipped in 2013.
Time will tell whether Seidenberg or Harbor Research nailed the predictive metrics, but regardless the industry seems poised to capitalize on the growth of M2M.
