No financial details about the deal have been announced. In addition to the platform, the companies said Tuesday that 11 employees will move to Ericsson.
M2M refers to machines communicating with each other over a wired or wireless network. There is a multitude of different applications for the technology, including smart meters, e-health, asset management and connected vehicles. In case of an accident, for example, a connected car could send information about the number of people in the vehicle to emergency personnel.
As operators look for new ways to make money, interest in M2M communications has been growing rapidly. For example, operators are looking to work together to improve connectivity costs. Recently, T-Mobile USA and U.K. operator Everything Everywhere announced they are working on embedded SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards that could be used to roam abroad at local rates. Germany’s Deutsche Telekom and France Télécom are also looking at how the two operators could work together in the M2M sector.
The number of M2M devices will increase from 62 million worldwide in 2010 to 2.1 billion in 2020, according to market research company Analysys Mason. With a year-on-year growth rate of between 36 per cent and 52 per cent, M2M has the potential to be one of the fastest-growing connectivity sectors in the next decade, it said.
