Machine communications does not yet have the necessary standard

The observation, noted in the last chapter, that there was massive potential in machine communications is not a new one. Over the last few decades many have noted that the installation of a wireless connection into myriad devices would bring a range of benefits. However, the market for machine communications to-date has been weak. There are some cars with embedded cellular modems and some relatively high-value items such as vending machines are equipped with cellular packet-data modems. But the market today is only a tiny fraction of the size it has long been predicted to grow to. This is predominantly due to the lack of a ubiquitous wireless standard that meets the needs of the vast majority of the machine market as set out in Chapter 1. There is no current wireless system that comes close to meeting all of these requirements.

Cellular technologies do provide sufficiently good coverage for some applications but the hardware costs can be $20 or more depending on the generation of cellular used and the subscription costs are often closer to $10 per month than $10 per year. Battery life cannot be extended much beyond a few months. Cellular networks are often ill-suited to the short message sizes in machine communications resulting in massive overheads associated with signalling in order to move terminals from passive to active states, report on status and more. So while cellular can capture a small percentage of the market which can tolerate the high costs and where devices have external power, it will not be able to meet the requirements of the 50 billion device market. Indeed, if it could, it would have done so already and there would be no further debate about the need for new standards.